Posted on 02/16/2017 9:35:44 AM PST by amorphous
...While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about.
“There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision.’ I mean, Jesus Christ, it is the president of the United States, you’re making some big decisions here, he ought to be entitled to hear all of those viewpoints and not to be driven down a certain path.”
But that can’t be true, I tell Panetta, because the aides he is talking about had no independent power aside from the authority that the president himself gave them.
“Well, that’s a good question,” Panetta allows. “He’s a smart guy, he’s not dumb.” It’s all part of the Washington blame game...
Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next time. “Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”
Panetta completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.” He looks at me curiously. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Other contributors to the role Ben Rhodes played in the Obama Administration are:
Ben Rhodes himself
Getting Rhodes to speak directly about the man whose gestalt he channels is a bit like asking someone to look into a mirror while describing someone else’s face. The Obama he talks about in public is, in part, a character that he has helped to create — based on a real person, of course — and is embedded in story lines that he personally constructs and manages. At the same time, he believes very deeply in Obama, the man and the president, and in the policies that he has helped to structure and sell on his behalf.
Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia. “Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.”
Samantha Power
“He was easily underestimatable,” Samantha Power recalls, of Rhodes’s arrival on the Obama campaign in 2007. Herself a writer, whose history of America’s responses to genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” won the Pulitzer Prize, Power went to work in Obama’s Senate office in 2005. Power is now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Her attire suggests a disingenuous ambivalence about her role in government that appears to be common among her cohort in the Obama administration, with a cardigan made of thick, expensive-looking cashmere worn over a simple frock, along with silver spray-painted rock ’n’ roll sneakers. See, I’m sympatico, the sneakers proclaim.
Early on, what struck her about Rhodes was how strategic he was. “He was leading quietly, initially, and mainly just through track changes, like what to accept and reject,” she says. When I ask her where Rhodes’s control over drafts of the candidate’s speeches came from, she immediately answers, “Obama,” but then qualifies her answer. “But it was Hobbesian,” she adds. “He had the pen. And he understood intuitively that having the pen gave him that control.” His judgment was superior to that of his rivals, and he refused to ever back down. “He was just defiant,” she recalls. “He was like: ‘No, I’m not. That’s bad. Obama wouldn’t want that.’ ”
Rob Malley
The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”
Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the days when the leaders’ words might take weeks to travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. “The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.”
President Trump needs to get Rhodes off the Holocaust Museum Board. What an obscene last-second appointment by Bob Ana.
His mom was Jewish.
He also admitted/bragged that he lied to Congress to get the Iran deal through without disclosing side agreements(effectively creating the path for an Iranian assault on Israel.) He is about as useful as Soros was during WWII.
What a bunch of NYT tripe. Ben Rhodes. 40 years old and once a keyboard writer ‘aspiring’ to be a novelist. Has a brother who made something of himself - however.
You all know what ‘aspiring’ means, don’t you? It’s the same word dead punk’s mommas, sisters and aunts use to describe how Shauntell was “on his way to college, turning his life around, was an aspiring hip hop artist - whatever.” when the raciss Po-Po cut him down.
A BALD 40 year old putz, just like all the other bald 40 year old liberal putzes who got lucky because he fell into a job because of his brother, I guess.
Just damn! NYT trying to poison history with wishful bullshit.
Fake news, fake deal, fake negotiators, fake president...
You need to read it again, perhaps between the lines, and with your blinders removed.
I understand that, but the final result is that the title and image of the piece is what prevails and gets promulgated. I don’t wear blinders. I wear filters that consider the source, the goals and conceptions derived and promulgated by sound bite media and pundits.
It certainly sounds like that's what some judge the entire piece by. I would hope many do read it for the insight it proves, for example the haphazard way the Iran deal was put together - just read what Leon had to say about that above.
Had Ben Rhodes (and the othrs mentioned ) been fired? I know the U.N. ambassador is replaced already.
I don’t know his current status, but imagine he is at the post Obama WH doing his best to hinder the current Administration’s efforts to MAGA, and reverse the damage Obama has done.
<><>(a) Valerie Jarrett and (b) National Security Adviser Susan Rice were appointed to the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
<><>(c) Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. (Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
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A good task for the Trump team.
How many state and US govt paychecks is Valerie cashing?
A much-used corrupt pol trick involves hand-picking people, putting then on govt payrolls long after you think they're gone.
<><>Is Valerie getting a US govt pension? How many?
<><>Is she on the payrolls of other US govt agencies?
<><> Is she listed as a no-show govt contractor?
=============================================
REFERENCE--- Valerie Jarrett in the White House also pocketed
a $36K Annual Pension For Part-Time Chicago Transit job
dailycaller.com ^ | 2/17/2016 | Chuck Ross / FR Posted by rktman
Chicago is known for its L-train. But it's the gravy train that White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett prefers to ride.
In addition to the $173,922 Jarrett earns per annum as President Obama's senior adviser, she is also paid an annual pension of $35,660 for the eight years she served as chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority, according to a Chicago Sun Times investigation.
Jarrett was appointed to chairman of the agency - a part-time position - in 1995 by then-mayor Richard Daley, whose brother, William Daley, served as Obama's chief of staff. Jarrett served as the former mayor's deputy chief of staff and was appointed to numerous other positions during his term. (Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
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REFERENCE----Wonder how many transportation bonds were issued while Jarrett was at Chicago Transit? Her pension payout would pale against her hidden income from lucrative Chicago bond deals.
==========================================
CONTACT CONGRESS--DEMAND THESE AGENCIES COMMENCE INVESTIGATIONS AT ONCE:
http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
<><> FBI -- Wire Fraud Division
<><> IRS-Fraud Unit
<><> Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General,
<><> Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General.
<><> DOJ's Criminal Division-- Public Integrity Section
The Congressional Research Service reports that for requests for both 2016 and 2017 fiscal years, Obama's proposed federal budget would expand funding through the Former Presidents Act. In 2017 alone, Obama wants nearly an 18% hike in expenditures… $588,000. That means $3.865,000 in appropriations will be available to spend on former Presidents! The 2016 proposed budget includes an additional $25,000 increase.
The Former Presidents Act, enacted in 1958, provides living former presidents with a pension, office staff and support, funds for travel, Secret Service protection, and mailing privileges. It also provides benefits for presidential spouses. Currently, former presidents are awarded a pension equal to the salary of cabinet secretaries, which totaled $203,700 for the 2015 calendar year and was boosted by $2,000 for the current calendar year.
Critics of the act argue that it financially supports former presidents who are not struggling. Many of them, alternatively, have gone on to profit from writing books about their time in the White House or delivering paid speaking engagements.
Former President Bill Clinton, for example, earned $132 million for delivering paid speeches between February 2001 and March 2015, according to an analysis from CNN. Clinton received $924,000 in taxpayer dollars last year by way of the Former Presidents Act.
Republicans in the House and Senate have introduced legislation that would cap annual pensions for former presidents at $200,000. Additionally, the bills would cut each pension by a dollar for every dollar the former president earns over $400,000 in the private sector in a given year. The measure was approved by the House in January with bipartisan support.
"It's pretty simple. You want a retirement and pension, it's there. But if you're going to go out and make enormous sums of money, then you don't need taxpayer subsidies," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), who introduced the bill in the House, told ABC News in an interview. "The former presidents are making gobs of money speaking and writing books, more power to them, but that doesn’t mean they need more taxpayer dollars on top of that," Chaffetz added. "It's embarrassing that they take that money."
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CONTACT CONGRESS HERE: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
Demand Congress vote no more money for ex-presidents.
Novelist = writes fiction.
Panetta stops.
“But would you make that same assessment now?” I ask him.
“Would I make that same assessment now?” he asks. “Probably not.”
I suspect Iran already has a nuclear weapon(s), or at least enough parts whereby it could assemble one fairly quickly. If so, they likely acquired such such during Obama’s tenure.
Which was what the entire Obama presidency represents, other than the damage it has done around the world - that's VERY real.
Rhodes was apparently one of Obama's main brain trusts, if this story is true, and I believe enough of it is based on the input of others cited, to make that determination.
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