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Ben Rhodes has offered us four lessons 1. the press really is both lazy and stupid 2. the press acts as obama's useful idiots 3. all of obama's policies are likely based on deceit 4. Ben Rhodes is an a**hole and a liar Ben Rhodes is the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications for Barack Obama and seems to have an extraordinary amount of influence in the current administration. Rhodes was the architect of the phony scheme to blame a video for the Benghazi attacks. He is also the guy who last April promised the Iran deal would contain "anywhere,...

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...

Panel discussion on the week's biggest news stories - 55 minutes of fact-based analysis and commentary. Enjoy! Now that the Republican primary has concluded, Donald Trump promises to be the most disruptive presidential candidate in decades. What do his positions on trade and immigration mean for the country, and why are so many “conservatives” so opposed to his candidacy? Across the ocean, London has elected their first Muslim mayor. Along with Merkel’s insistence that borders remain open, is there a way to reverse the Islamification of western culture? Meanwhile, security concerns continue domestically as the FBI busts a would-be terrorist...

<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...

Following a dramatic deterioration in official diplomatic channels between the US and Saudi Arabia when over the weekend the Saudis threatened the U.S. with dumping billions in Treasuries if Congress were to pass a bill probing into their alleged support of Sept 11 terrorists in the aftermath of last weekend's 60 Minutes report on the classified "28 pages" from the Septemeber 11 commission, moments ago the Obama administration made a stunning admission, when for the first time it revealed on the record that the Saudis were the original source of funding for Al Qaeda. As Politico reports, Obama's deputy national...

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age. Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”

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...

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...

In an article appearing in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes (@rhodes44) admits what Israel supporters claimed all along: He lied to Congress in order to sell the nuclear sellout to Iran. Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new...

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,...

Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so. In an astounding New York Times piece by David Samuels, senior White House officials gleefully confess they use friendly reporters and nonprofits as public relations tools in the selling of President Obama’s foreign policy — and can do it almost at will because these tools are ignorant, will believe what they’re told, will essentially take dictation and are happy to be used just to get the information necessary for a tweet or...

Why are today’s working poor so quiescent? I’m not the only one posing this question. “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist. “Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. The headline on an April 7 National Catholic Reporter article reads: “Why aren’t Americans doing more to protest inequality?” There are legitimate grounds for grievance. For those in the bottom quintile, household income in inflation-adjusted dollars has dropped sharply, from $13,787 in 2000 to $11,651 in 2013. According to the Census Bureau, 64 million Americans currently live in...