And so, when Anthony Cordesman, a foreign policy dignitary in this town's think tank circuit, dropped an article on Wednesday headlined "Israel as a Strategic Liability," he made sure to open with a plethora of qualifications.
The next month, Mr Assad pressed ahead with holding a referendum on a new constitution which dropped an article giving the Baath Party unique status as the "leader of the state and society" in Syria.
The most the players could realistically hope to pick up was some circumstantial detail that they could drop into an article, to make it look like they were in the inner circle: the colour of his tie, or the sudden greying of his hair, or some unjustified generalisation about his mood ("this week the prime minister seemed in better spirits than at any time since the referendum defeat", etc).
In another case, children's last names were dropped in an article on bullying, in an effort to protect them, but the first names were quite distinctive and tended to identify them.
So after my post last week about buying a house based on your situation, my jaw dropped when I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal about young home buyers.
On Thursday, one day after that report dropped, the New York Times published an article detailing decades of sexual harassment allegations against powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who both apologized for his behavior and threatened to sue the paper for revealing it.
In 1935, fears of an AMA backlash helped persuade Franklin Roosevelt's advisers to drop a health care article from the Social Security package -- fearful that the opposition would sink the legislation altogether.
Downing Street has denied that David Cameron is dropping his environmental commitments, after an article said the Prime Minister had instructed his aides to "get rid of all the green crap" in relation to green levies.
But it is only recently that he has been publicly weaving together his two passions, dropping references to Rand into an article for Bridge Today, where he is an occasional contributor, and crediting Objectivism for his success when speaking to the bridge media.
