Not sure I’ve heard the phrase “monkey trick” before, but Henry Scanlon outlines one of the ways Leftists succeed in the information war:
How the heck do they do it, Comey and Schiff? Each can deliver a string of half-truths, contradictions, outlandish obfuscations, distortions, misrepresentations, and even preposterously self-serving whoppers in a way – and here’s the monkey trick – that makes him seem, on balance, and taken as a whole…reasonable.
Anderson Cooper dinged Comey pretty hard, and then Brett Baier absolutely hammered him, but if you don’t know the underlying facts, the contradictory things previously said; if you don’t know the history of vicious predation; if you don’t realize that the narrative is rife with holes and implausibilities; in short, if you are not paying very close attention, it all comes off as a guy reading off the latest baseball statistics or offering a favorite recipe for shrimp and grits – what sounds remarkably like the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but which is fully, completely, shrewdly exsanguinated. There is no blood, no guts, no there. A recitative… It’s as if, rather than being a participant in the events under discussion, they are reviewing a movie, each a dispassionate critic passing aesthetic rather than moral judgment from the vantage point of a merely observing (and therefore unaccountable) audience member.
Weirdly, it seems to work: they come off as reasonable guys, giving reasonable answers in good faith and with innocent intention. Somehow, the fact that none of it hangs together and all of it is self-serving fails to register. As such, they get a pass.
Here’s the way Jonah Goldberg put it in a tweet:
I don’t think people appreciate Adam Schaff’s [sic] incredible talent to sound above the fray, non partisan and more in sorrow than in anger, while being hyper partisan.
Read more: American Thinker
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