Obama folk and Facebook folk contest these charges. But both are very believable, because they reflect a trend on the Left that has taken hold in the Obama era: the dismissal of the Right and the Center-Right as fundamentally bad-faith actors. Armed with the conviction that the other guys are fools, knaves, or both, it’s reasonable to suppress their arguments, or to create an “echo chamber” that excludes their views.

“Eliminationist” might be a good word for this censorious attitude. Most liberals and progressives aren’t eliminationists, they favor debate and still believe in the competition of ideas. But in all corners of the Modern Left, you can find the imperious types who are simply done arguing, or, as the President says, “We know what works. We know what we have to do. We’ve just got to put aside the stale and outmoded debates.”…

Rhodes’ premise — and the analogous behavior of Krugman and so many Obamacare pushers — is that the arguments against his are not valid. The corollary: he is certain he is correct.

This hubris is dangerous and stupid. And in the Obama administration’s foreign policy shop, this cockiness is inexplicable. Foreign policy expert Dan Drezner put it nicely in the Washington Post: “At a minimum, anyone with a hand in running American foreign policy while the Russian ‘reset’ collapsed, the Arab spring curdled, and Syria, Libya and Yemen disintegrated might consider whether such self-certainty is truly deserved.”