They Get the Speeches, We Get the Policies

You can identify the ambitious by virtue of their willingness to subordinate what they know to be true to what they must pretend to be true. The outward manifestations of this phenomenon are often linguistic.

Examples of this condition are, unfortunately, not hard to come by. My favorite might be a moment in late November 2021, following the discovery of Covid’s Omicron variant, in which Dr. Anthony Fauci demonstrated the degree to which his core competency was bureaucratic ladder-climbing. The doctor clearly and repeatedly referred to it as “Omicron,” before handing the mic to President Joe Biden, who inexplicably and repeatedly called it “Omni-cron.” Without skipping a beat and absent any guidance, Fauci, too, started calling it “Omni-cron.” That’s some high-test toadying.