Confidence men know that their victim is eventually going to realize he’s been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately and goes to the police, or only after the confidence man is long gone.
So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty — a delaying process called “cooling out the mark.”
We’re now seeing a cooling out” process, growing out of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
The belated release of State Department e-mails shows that the Obama administration knew, while the attack was still underway, that it was a coordinated, armed terrorist attack. They were getting reports from those inside the consulate, as well as surveillance pictures from an American drone overhead.
Why then did both President Obama and UN Ambassador Susan Rice keep repeating the story that this was a spontaneous protest riot against an anti-Islamic video in America?
The White House knew the facts — but knew that the voting public did not. What the White House needed was a process of “cooling out” the voters, keeping them distracted or in uncertainty as long as possible.
The White House had to know that it was only a matter of time before the truth would come out. But time was what mattered, with an election close at hand. The longer they could stretch out the period of distraction and uncertainty — “cooling out” the voters — the better.
As the video story began to unravel, earlier misstatements were blamed on “the fog of war” that obscures many events. But there was no such “fog of war” in this case. The administration knew what was happening while it was happening.
They didn’t know all the details, but they knew enough to know that this was no protest that got out of hand.