If you watch White House or State Department pressers, you know that nobody ever answers the questions anymore.
It is surreal. A question is asked and Josh Earnest, the press secretary at the White House, ploughs on with an “answer” that doesn’t even touch on the question he has just been asked to address.
White House senior advisers are quoted calling Israel’s Prime Minister a “coward” and “chickensh-t,” and the president's national security adviser, Susan Rice, predictably responds that U.S.-Israeli relations have never been better. La di da.
You will better understand what is going on if you read Victor Davis Hanson's piece at NRO on our “make-it-up world.” Hanson observes that “facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of progressivism.”
Hanson writes:
Do bothersome facts matter anymore?
Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.
The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.
Some days Americans are told there is no reason to restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African country.
There is a reason facts are ignored:
Language is useful for inventing new realities. “Illegal alien” is a time-tested noun denoting foreign citizens who crossed a national border contrary to law.
“Undocumented immigrant” is now used to diminish the bothersome fact that millions have broken and continue to break the law….
Progressives believed that because traditional protocols, language, and standards were usually created by stuffy old establishment types, the rules no longer necessarily should apply. Instead, particular narratives and euphemisms that promoted perceived social justice became truthful. Bothersome facts were discarded.
I have often wondered how Obama administration press spokesmen are trained to ignore the question and just go onto say something that, at best, merely touches on what was asked.
I’m still not clear on how press secretaries are instructed, but now I know what is behind the world view that allows them to do what they do.
Victor Davis Hanson’s article, nothing short of chilling, is today’s must read.