Obama On Day After It's Revealed His Foreign Policy Guru Has Been Deceiving America With Fictional Psyops: "This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show."

Obama on Trump: "This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show." https://t.co/akQVZypKkW — Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 6, 2016



Really, asshole?

When Jon Favreau (the partisan hack speechwriter, not the actor/director/writer) was asked if crafting narratives for Obama was a major part of his job, he responded:

"We saw that as our entire job."

Here's that quote in context:

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama�s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes's, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, "We saw that as our entire job."

You really want to lecture us all on the difference between reality and entertainment, asshole?

On Twitter, a guy named @motionview asked what is the journalistic equivalent for the police's famous "Blue Wall of Silence"? Reporters like noting the Blue Wall exists; why do they not admit themselves they have an equivalent?

They know these people. Some are friends. Some are hookups and cheats.

And they all have an implicit No First Strike agreement with each other, backed by Mutual Assured Destruction -- you say anything negative about me, maybe I'll put out the word the rumors I've heard about you.

I propose we call this the "Gray Wall of Silence." Gray, in reference to the New York Times and its still-displayed Pulitzers for covering up the Soviet slaughters and still not admitting that a 1930s reporter was on Stalin's payroll.

Also, gray, because of smudged newsprint and the way they bury news they don't want to talk about, in a guazy haze of evasions.

I have queried several journalists whether they'll be covering this. I imagine the answers I'll get will be "we're working on it, can't say yet" to forestall me from noting they won't be covering it. They'll work on it, work on it, work on it -- and then weeks from now, they'll say "well it's not a story any longer, is it?"

So that's part of the gray wall too -- that they won't give you the white of a yes or a black of a no. Just this hazy "we're trying" but, goshdarnit, they never seem to be able to get it on to the air.

Update: one guy i'm talking to actually doesn't know about this. he just skimmed the headline, doesn't understand how serious this is. I suppose that may change. (I'm a hopeful kind of guy, as you know.)

Update: The Force Multipliers themselves are now Tweetsplaining why the Force Multiplier revelations are no big deal.

The wagon-circling is underway. "It's a nothingburger!"

No, it's a major collapse of journo and expert ethics. https://t.co/6oL8TPkcY9 — Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 6, 2016

This Ben Rhodes controversy is kind of silly and these @cherylrofer tweets do a good job explaining why https://t.co/dZThF9W0II — Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) May 6, 2016

The scandal concerns Beauchamp's and his Force Multipliers getting together in a mutually-retweeting coordinated shout-down ring mocking people on Twitter for telling the truth.

Now, in response to people telling the truth, he hereby proposes to shout them down with a coordinated Force Mulitiplier retweeting of others' You-so-silly tweets.

Before I decide -- I'll have to see what Laura Rozen ("She was my RSS feed," says one Obama flack), Max Fischer, and the rest of the Force Multiplier gang have to say.