"Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

"I've had a number of these myself, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

"First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

"You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks.

I've long thought that criticizing the POTUS or other top officials -- who we though to be moral right before they received their uber-top-secret debriefings -- was seriously flawed. I've had this debate many times with close friends.

They're like, "He lied to us." And I say, "Well, he might know something now that he didn't know then, and now his previous self looks like a fool compared to who he is now, and he can't even tell us why."

This is quite likely very true, but it also has dangers. This could be true for Obama, for example, and I happen to believe it is. But it's not 100% -- even for a principled guy like him. People can still make mistakes regarding what is communicated to us within this scaffolding, which I'm also sure he has.

But the bigger danger is that someone can be a complete lunatic, or criminal, or manipulator, or tyrant, and then use this same defense. In order for someone to be sure this is actually happening, i.e. that the information is what changed his behavior, one has to be sure that he was (and still is) basically a good person.

So then we're right back to perspective and bias.

Anyway, that's what I believe about Obama: that he had all these massive plans about walking in and shutting down GitMo and doing x, y, z. And the people who knew what was up just smiled and nodded until his briefings.

Then, Obama walks out and suddenly stops talking about those things anymore. And the public, who knows very little about what's really going on, proceeds to hold Obama to the standard of his previous self, i.e. the one who was as ignorant as they still are.

Frustration ensues -- on both sides.

The only question for me is HOW true this is. As I said, this could be combined with him making errors in priority of communication. I have always said I'd like a clear statement from him saying, "Uh, yeah...so that stuff I said...it's more complicated than that, and I'm going to do the best I can, but it's not as simple as when I was campaigning because I didn't know the facts. Unfortunately, you don't know the facts either, and I can't tell you what they are. You'll just have to trust me on this."

If he said that to me, I'd give him some trust, and I do even now without him having said it, but he hasn't said it (to my knowledge), and that's a problem for me.

But yes, this is a brilliant piece. It highlights something that's always bothered me about opinionated ignorant people: they speak as if they have all the information when they have worse than none. They instead have some, which is functionally worse than none, because they think that some is all, and can't fathom that some very little compared to the actual truth. ::

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