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November 7, 2013
It’s not easy to get a lie into a presidential speech
Every draft address is circulated to the White House senior staff and key Cabinet officials in something called the “staffing process.”Every line is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections. During this process, it turns out, some of Obama’s policy advisers objected to the “you can keep your plan” pledge, pointing out that it was untrue. But it stayed in the speech. That does not happen by accident. It requires a willful intent to deceive. Marc Thiessen: Obama’s dishonest presidency - The Washington Post
Posted by gerardvanderleun at November 7, 2013 3:06 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Having served for a year as the chief speechwriter for the secretary of the Army, I am intimately familiar with the staffing process. (It is not just speeches that get staffed, btw, but every kind of document that requires approval or decision by a principal.)
When I was staffing drafts of the secretary's speeches, the officer most familiar with the info being discussed would carefully review it. This was almost always a lieutenant colonel actually working the issue. Then his colonel director would read it and the light colonel's notes, then their general officer would, too. Only then would I get it back.
Ensuring the accuracy of sentences to emerge from the lips of the secretary was taken VERY seriously, you can bet. How much more so would or should that be for a president?
That a declaration of this magnitude - it was the keystone of Obama's selling points - would slip through unnoted and uncorrected is possible only if:
A. the staff is of a stunning level of incompetence
B. the staff to whom it was circulated were not the technical staffers who would actually know the issue, but the political and public relations staff who simply wanted to know how it would play in Peoria.
My guess is it is the latter, that the action staff who actually knew what the details were never got to see drafts of the president's campaign speeches (and every speech this president gives is a campaign speech).
This was all done at the political-PR level, and that displays nothing but his and his inner circle's dismissive contempt for you and me, and their idea that spin is reality.
Perhaps now, though, "the chickens are coming home to roost." (But I doubt it.)
Posted by: Donald Sensing at November 7, 2013 3:13 PM
One should not underestimate the joy of successfully lying to the multitudes. There is no fear of exposure in the leftoid; rather, the calculation is a strategy to make accomplices of them. On a smaller but common scale it is called enabling.
Posted by: james wilson at November 7, 2013 4:30 PM
That was how it used to be done. Here is how the process works with Obama. That giant sucking sound is the sound of staffers vacuuming The Lightbringer's balloon knot.
Posted by: Scott M at November 8, 2013 2:35 AM
"...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation." ~ Adolf Hitler
So there.
Posted by: chasmatic at November 9, 2013 6:55 AM
All politicians lie. The folly is we continue to believe them.
Posted by: Tom at November 11, 2013 6:37 AM