I don’t often disagree with Pete, but on this one I respectfully dissent. I think it’s an excellent thing for the public if ideas and developments that are indefensible are not well-defended. The listener rightly infers that this is because they can’t be defended, at least not without a lot of hocus-pocus.

Dick Morris got interviewed the other night on some news show. He was explaining–not smugly but with a tad too much satisfaction for my taste–that, as an old hand at crisis management, his advice to Senator Daschle would be to identify the least bad of his three or four problems and then apologetically talk about that least bad thing ad nauseum–thereby exhausting the media’s and the public’s attention span for the rest. I was wishing someone would ask Morris whether it bothered him that this was so fraudulent–counseling the long “apology” that is literally just an act of contrition, a strategy to minimize all the stuff for which the guy has to apologize. But instead it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world that the manner in which corruption, incompetence, or implausibility is managed and spun is as big and interesting a story as the underlying corruption, incompetence, or implausibility. I thought the Clinton administration was like that for eight years–the president would be caught in some scandal or another and the media would make the story not the scandal but how the old master would dig his way out of this one.

The public may prefer to have sweet nothings whispered in its ear, but I think it’s healthier if bad policy, decisions and selections look, sound, and feel like they are awkward to defend.