The Men Who Would Be King

[WestVirginiaRebel]

PJ Media:

The New York Times has an article describing how Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, sold fiction as truth in communicating the president's foreign policy. Rhodes regarded the deception as a clever way to success. Like an engineering student who has found a way to cheat on his final exam, or a man astonished to find himself with a medical license by mistake, Rhodes appears to think he's actually accomplished something positive. He has no clue he's set up a disaster that is only waiting to happen. Thomas Ricks, writing in Foreign Policy, calls the article "a stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru."

 

But it is also a profile of the president. As David Samuels wrote in the NYT source article, Rhodes saw himself as a reflection of the president:

 

Part of what accounts for Rhodes's influence is his "mind meld" with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase "mind meld" verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn't think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, "I don't know anymore where I begin and Obama ends."

 

 

Rhodes is the reflection. Obama is the originating image. Rhodes is just a flunky who transcribes what the president dictates. Still the Samuels article, by printing the administration's admission of its willful deception on Iran policy, provides crucial insight into the fascinating subject of whether Barack Obama -- if you believe he is a failure -- is incompetent or malevolent.

 

Which is it?

________

 

Both?

[Valin]

A President Who Learned Nothing
Max Boot

May 6, 2016

 

Ben Rhodes, a 38-year-old former creative writing major, has emerged as one of President Obama’s closest foreign policy aides in spite of his almost complete lack of any qualifications in international relations, defense, area studies, or any related field. As deputy national security adviser, he travels with the president, sees him all day long, and not only writes his speeches and communications strategies but also shapes the content of policy.

 

(Snip)

 

But what really struck me about the article is the supreme arrogance that grips this White House.

 

That is an occupational hazard in any White House, of course, but Obama and his closest aides take it to a new level. Samuels repeatedly notes that Rhodes has “contempt” and “aggressive contempt” for “anyone or anything that stands in the president’s way” and for “the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press.”

 

(Snip)

 

Instead of denigrating their predecessors and the Washington “foreign policy establishment,” Obama and Rhodes would be better advised to look within and to ask what went wrong: Why were their high hopes, the hopes encapsulated in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, so cruelly dashed? Some of it is due to events beyond their control–but a lot was due to the mistakes they made and continue to make. The fact that the president and his top aides seem to have no awareness of those mistakes is mystifying and dismaying.