The Chauncey Gardiner hypothesis

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic always assumed (as did many of us), that Ari Fleischer was a "diabolical genius," but maybe not:

While I was slogging through [Fleischer's] book, I happened to be e-mailing with a conservative I know. My correspondent thought my Ari-as-virtuoso theory was silly: "When Ari worked on the Hill he was widely considered to be a moron even by other press secretaries, who are mostly a bunch of ignorant dolts themselves." But how, I asked, could he have run circles around the Washington press corps? "Ari is a genius like the [Peter] Sellers character in Being There," he replied. "He was too stupid and too ignorant to know he was telling lies."

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