When asked about any event of political consequence, simply juxtapose it to an artificially elevated or lowered standard depending upon whether you’re on offense or defense.
If your political opponent does something well, compare it to what should have been achieved, but wasn’t.
Conversely, if you do something wrong, compare it to worse things committed by others under similar circumstances.
Thanks to these easily adjustable standards, both your rival’s success and your own transgression become relatively insignificant by default.
These were the tactics in play every time you witnessed a politico or his surrogate being questioned and said to yourself, "Damn, he’s off the hook again!" It’s a fair observation. How do these characters so often manage to escape accountability, even when they’re seemingly caught either doing or being whatever it is that’s triggering the inquiry? It’s easy; we encourage them by tolerating these same kaleidoscopic parameters denoting right and wrong.
Please understand - this is not just another recipe in spin, which is an emphasis on whatever favors one side over the other regardless of substance. AMC actually allows the powerful and their surrogates to hide things in plain sight despite their culpability. Emblematic of this are the fantasy battles still surrounding pre-Iraq war intelligence and proof of Iranian attacks against us.
In July of 2004, the 9-11 Commission published their analysis of the events that culminated in the assault that would later define us. While there was legitimate criticism over its political neutrality and deductive competence, it nonetheless managed to crystallize the circumstances, activities and intelligence breakdowns better than had anything else at the time.
Then as now, there was bombastic debate concerning whether or not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda. However, when the 9-11 Commission issued their report, a different standard was created. No longer were links the measure of illicit cooperation between the two; the new gauge had become operational links and the commission said there were none. But the commission never argued that there were no serious links whatsoever. Predictably, this fact ran contrary to the anticipatory journalism behind the Washington Post’s headline a month earlier reporting that the, "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed."
