Listening to Ezekiel Emanuel try – on Obama’s behalf – to weasel out of the president’s infamous promise about our being able to keep our insurance and keep our doctors brought to mind this thumbnail sketch from\u00a0Witness<\/em>, Whittaker Chambers’s autobiography and exploration of the mentality of the Left:<\/p>\n

…if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. \u00a0That was not strange; that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. \u00a0What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. \u00a0There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. \u00a0If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. \u00a0He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else. \u00a0More adroitly and more completely than any other Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction that the party line is always right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To some extent, all party loyalists are at risk of falling into the trap of defending something they had attacked before, or vice-versa. \u00a0It is well that very few possess the ability to do so with full awareness of what they’re doing, and an utter lack of shame in doing it.
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