The madness of King George, continued

When governments go mad, not many eminent observers will allow themselves even to see it, much less comment on it. Rather than shout out the awful truth--i.e., that the emperor is not just naked, but insane--those with large investments in the status quo would much prefer to hold that there's a method to the madness, that the man on top is crazy like a fox ("Come on, he's only saying that, to please his base!"), or that he's just a figurehead, with wiser others close at hand to keep him an eye on him. To claim otherwise would be alarmist and naive, while those professionals in the know know better than to think that what has obviously happened here has obviously happened here. Thus the pundit comes across as a more reasonable person than those scary few who tell the truth out loud; and yet that soothing view is founded less on any rational analysis than on the pundit's sense of his own rationality, which he projects, complacently, onto the zealots at the top.

-- Mark Crispin Miller, Reality always wins