Earlier this week, the U.S. president said, speaking about Iran: “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay.”
That is an exact quote.
The next morning, the White House’s communications director explained what the president meant by those remarks: “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”
Except that’s not what the president said. What he actually said, quite plainly, was that Iran blowing up a few large cities in the U.S. is a small price to pay for America winning the ongoing war between the two nations.
Which leads me to wonder about two things: (1) How many Americans agree with what the president actually said? (2) How stressful must it be to be the White House communications director — a job where you need to keep making stuff up and pretending that nobody will notice?