Tommy Vietor is (sadly) emblematic of the New Washington

From May 2013

Benghazi: The high price of rampant knowingness

The distinctive feature of coercive “experts” like Joe Biden or Joe Salazar is that they are credentialed, not proficient. They assume the right to make decisions for others, but that assumption is based on “media consensus” and insider back-scratching. It is not, demonstrably in the case of Biden and Salazar, based on proven expertise or knowledge.

Ours is an age of Knowingness Rampant.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons for the Benghazi disaster.

The Clinton team perfected modern scandal management: Stonewall as long as you can, then, dismiss the inconvenient truth as '"old news".

Or, as Tommy Vietor mights say, "Dude, that was like two years ago."

Of course, this can only work with a lazy and complicit press. Mitt Romney's prep school days were long ago but, somehow, they were not "old news."

Similarly, during Watergate, lies by the White House goaded the MSM to dig deeper. Up until now, Anita Dunn's little lapdogs have been happy to swallow the lies, wipe their chin, and ask for more.

What remains to be seen is if David Halberstam's analysis still holds true.

A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.