Free Republic

The internet was abuzz following a story by David Samuels on the jerk who admitted he manipulated the truth to get the president’s absurd deal with Iran accepted (accepted, that is, by the Democrats in Congress who blocked a Republican resolution to reject it). In case you missed it I’ll provide a quick summary of the salient parts, but that shouldn’t be the end of the story: the press having allowed itself to be flimflammed into being mere White House megaphones needs to redeem itself, should it care to win back even the tiniest shred of credibility. It probably won’t,...

In light of Ben Rhodes' revelation over the weekend that he led a White House effort to lie about the Iranian nuclear deal, it is useful to look back at last summer, when the White House attacked the Associated Press and its diplomatic reporter, @APDiplowriter (Matt Lee) for asking too many questions about the deal, particularly about the side agreement that allows the Iranians to 'self-inspect' their weapons production facility at Parchin. What this story is really about is the politicization of expertise, and how far things can go when one group of experts (arms controllers) decides to fight...

It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the American foreign-policy establishment." What Obama calls the "Washington playbook" dictating the sorts of responses available to American policymakers, Rhodes calls the "Blob." Blob includes "editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker," etc. It also encompasses, according to Rhodes, Obama's former secretary of state Hillary Clinton,...

Ben Rhodes is perhaps the weirdest foreign policy adviser in the history of the White House. His path to his current position as deputy national security adviser for strategic communications was, as this New York Times profile informs us, "perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction." Forget his title. Ben Rhodes is "the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself," according to the Times. What makes that so bizarre is that Rhodes has no background in foreign policy at all. He was a failed short story writer who wandered into the orbit of Obama aides...

When it comes to foreign policy, President Obama has spent more than seven years now living the dream. And I mean dream, as in fantasy -- a trip to an alternate universe. Never mind the dangerous and in some cases deadly realities that increasingly beset the rest of the planet. For the White House, it's been one glorious fiction after another. Russia was a "reset." Libya was a success. So was the pivot to Asia. The tide of war is receding. There was a red line in Syria (until there wasn't). The Iran nuclear program is now "exclusively peaceful." America's...

<p>The profile of one Ben Rhodes running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating.</p> <p>But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob."</p>

The Obama administration misled Americans about supposed "moderates" that officials were dealing with in the Iranian theocracy to forge a nuclear proliferation deal — all to make the deal more palatable to the American public, according to The New York Times. {snip}... "We created an echo chamber," he tells the Times in a piece to appear in the Sunday magazine of the newspaper. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say," he adds about so-called experts praising the deal in the press. According to the Times, when Rhodes was asked about his misleading version of...

Deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes orchestrated an 'echo chamber' of media support for Obama's Iran deal He spoke candidly about his tactics to a New York Times Magazine writer Tactics included planting talking points with compliant reporters Also helped arms-control experts land in influential positions where they could parrot the White House's line on the deal's virtues Even then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now says he's not sure the president's aims were what the White House said they were at the time White House routinely 'ventriloquizes' reporters, the Times story explains The Obama White House set up...

We hope Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are giving that devastating new profile of resident Obama’s foreign-policy guru a careful read. Because they’ll learn how they were all played for fools on the Iran nuclear deal by that aide, Ben Rhodes — and the resident. That applies especially to Schumer, who will be the Senate Democratic leader come January. Booker and Gillibrand hewed to the party line in backing the deal. Schumer gave it a thumb’s-down — but then refused to lobby his colleagues to take his side. Sen. Bob Menendez, on the other hand, is looking...