Thursday, May 29, 2008

On message

You gotta give it to them, the folks at Fox News sure do no how to smear someone on message. If I believed in such a thing I would say this is karma for McClellan having been part of that smear machine for 3 years. See here, for instance

Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let's look at the politics of it.
That's McClellan on Richard Clarke's book that revealed that the White House team had been focusing - at the expense of not focusing on terrorism - on how to remove Saddam from day 1 in office.

McClellan has hinted that it's difficult for loyalists like himself to see reality when they're in the administration. That's why I'm not surprised the White House (and its extension at Fox News) is "puzzled" by McClellan's book. Of course they are. They live in an epistemic fun house of mirrors where all they see is their own views and opinions reflected back at them over and over again.

This process is best described by Nazi Albert Speer who experienced it in its most extreme manifestation

In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fanstastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In these mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.

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