zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski / a.k.a. “zen“]

This is absolutely amazing.

Quite possibly the most damning thing I have ever read about the Obama national security inner circle. This NYT profile far exceeds any wild polemic by an overventilating right-wing pundit. Ben Rhodes, whose complete lack of any FP/Defense/Mil/IC qualifications would have relegated him to getting coffee for bigwigs in any other NSC in history, is a Deputy National Security Adviser with Oval Office walk-in access. He gloats about his yes-man relationship with the POTUS, disparages Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, boasts of lying to reporters and mocks the servility of Beltway celebrity journalists who faithfully retweet the administration talking points he gives them. It reminds me of the tone of that Rolling Stone article that sank Stanley McChrystal.

The Aspiring Novelist who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru

….He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.

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.”

I think we know where we can find your head, Ben.

….One result of this experience was that when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

Boost thinks very highly of me. My notes are so impressive that they have taken on the form of ideas, he feels. I capture other people’s words in a manner that not only organizes them, but inserts a clarity and purpose that was not present in the original idea. Connections are made between two opposing ideas that were not apparent in the meeting. I have gotten at not only the representation of things, but the way that the mind actually works.

Is this for real? Who thinks of themselves like this?

….Obama relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because “Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling uncomfortable. “The president will be like, ‘Ben, something on your mind?’ And then Ben will have this incredibly precise lay-down of why the previous half-hour has been an utter waste of time, because there’s a structural flaw to the entire direction of the conversation.”

The literary character that Rhodes most closely resembles, Power volunteers, is Holden Caulfield. “He hates the idea of being phony, and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”

Somewhere, someplace, J.D. Salinger is throwing up next to a dry-heaving George Kennan.

There are White Houses in the past where an article of this kind would have gotten the staffer in question fired on the spot. That however was a more serious time.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2016 at 3:28 am and is filed under #FAIL, 21st century, America, national security, new york times, obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.