President Barack Obama talks to his alter-ego the arrogant liar deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes in the Oval Office.
President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser (and foreign policy alter-ego) Ben Rhodes has been the subject of intense criticism since May 5, 2016 when the New York Times Magazine profiled him. The writer of the article, David Samuels, highlighted his inexperience, arrogance, and lies. Rhodes referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. Rhodes bragged how he helped Obama produce false narratives and manipulate the media. Also, Rhodes was the point person in the Benghazi cover-up. He should be indicted for lying to the nation and writing false talking points for Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and others. Obama should be impeached for all the crimes he has committed in office.
David Samuels wrote a profile of Ben Rhodes entitled “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru: How Ben Rhodes Rewrote the Rules of Diplomacy for the Digital Age” which was published in the New York Times Magazine on May 5, 2016. Samuels explained how Rhodes, a former speechwriter, sold the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran by creating a false claim of “moderate” Iranian officials.
Samuels explained that Rhodes, the Boy Wonder of the Obama White House, is now 38 years old. As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad, and runs communication strategies across the White House. He is the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy. Obama and Rhodes communicate “regularly, several times a day, in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls”.
Samuels pointed out that Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba, and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. Yet, Rhodes lack of conventional real-world experience — 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 the influence of Rhodes is his “mind meld” with the president. He knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, Rhodes confessed, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”
Rhodes is sitting in the White House Situation Room during a video conference.
How horrible! Here we have an inexperienced and arrogant liar White House official who is driving U.S. foreign policy together with a president who is a Marxist and hidden radical Muslim and despises the nation that elected him twice. It is no wonder that the nation is now a Superpower in complete retreat.
Samuels said that “Rhodes and his assistants have a well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who they can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from senior White House officials and spokespeople.” Ben Rhodes’ wife, Ann Norris, works in the State Department. The older brother of Ben Rhodes, David is president of CBS News, an organization that recently initiated the effort to declassify the contents of the classified 28 pages of the September 11 report.
This writer has written in his recent book, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Radical Islam (2016), that Saudi Arabia, with the help of Iran, participated in the 9/11 attacks. Both presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have covered-up their participation in this serious act of war. It is time to tell the truth to the American people!
The New York Times Magazine reporter said that previously Rhodes served as a staff member to former Congressman Lee Hamilton on the 9/11 Commission (Hamilton is a member of the three very powerful globalist organizations, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission, whose elitist members want a planetary government). It was there that Rhodes met Denis McDonough, another Hamilton protégé. Rhodes then became the chief note-taker for the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission that criticized President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. He accompanied Hamilton and his Republican counterpart of the group, former secretary of state James Baker, to their meetings with Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, David Petraeus, Vice President Dick Cheney and many others.
Rhodes is attending a nuclear-security summit meeting in March 2016 where President Obama met with dictator Xi Jinping of China.
David Samuels stated the following: “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’ 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.”
Samuels explained that the days of Rhodes at the White House start with the president’s daily briefing, together with Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Adviser Avril Haines, and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco. The position for which Rhodes was hired to do was to help Obama communicate with the public. The impact of digital technologies changed the nature of his job.
Rhodes told Samuels, with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances, the following: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus, now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Samuels pointed out that in this environment, Rhodes become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, one of his assistants explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them. And I’ll give them some color and the next thing I know, lots of these guys is in the dot-com publishing space, and has huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” With great cynicism he said “Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.”
The Iran lie
Samuels stated the following: “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 political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal… In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the story of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a moderate faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime hard-liners in an election and then began to pursue a policy of openness, which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program… There had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the moderate camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making.”
Rhodes and Obama wanted for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.
Samuels said that the messaging campaign by Rhodes was very effective not simply because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. As representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’ war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. Many arms-control experts began appearing at think tanks and on social media and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. Rhodes bragged how “We created an echo chamber; they were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” Rhodes is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents…‘We created an echo chamber,’ he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’”
One of the few individuals willing to speak on the record was Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s head of the C.I.A. and secretary of defense. Samuels asked him about the Obama administration’s public narrative on Iran, whether the Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between “hard-line” and “moderate” camps. “No,” Panetta answered. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction, he said.”
The White House’s top spin doctor, Ben Rhodes, assisted Obama to turn American foreign policy upside down. Rhodes in his White House office with the picture of Obama holding his daughter in the background is proud of his false narratives and media manipulation.
Samuels asked Panetta whether, as head of the C.I.A., or later on, as secretary of defense, he ever saw the letters that Obama covertly sent to Khamenei in 2009 and 2012. “No,” he answered, before saying he would “like to believe” that Tom Donilon, national security adviser since 2010, and Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, had a chance to work on the offer they presented.
Samuels stated the following: “As secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They were both interested in the answer to the question, ‘Is the president serious?’ Panetta recalls. And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where we had evidence that they’re developing an atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen. But would you make that same assessment now? I ask him. Would I make that same assessment now? he asks. Probably not…In Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine. Obama and his aides used political elders like him, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton as cover to end the Iraq war, and then decided to steer their own course, he suggests. While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about…Rhodes said that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.”
L. Gordon Crovitz wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal titled “Trump and the Obama Effect” which was published on May 8, 2016. Crovitz said that there has rarely been a disclosure as illuminating as how President Obama’s top spin doctor, Ben Rhodes, helped turn American foreign policy upside down. As explained earlier, the reporter explained that the profile of Rhodes done by David Samuels details how the former speechwriter sold the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran by creating a false claim of “moderate” Iranian officials. Rhodes brags about keeping Obama’s long-standing plan to elevate Iran over allies, such as Israel and the Gulf States, hidden from the public by manipulating liberal journalists and think-tank analysts and relaying on the short attention span of social media to conceal the truth. Obama misled the public on everything, from ObamaCare to immigration policy. Now we see up close how the administration’s manipulation extends even to the most important change to U.S. foreign policy in decades, the Iranian nuclear accord.
Crovitz said that Ben Rhodes proudly shares the false narrative regarding Iran that claimed the nuclear negotiations started only after Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013. In fact, the deal was set well before the supposed moderate was in power. Samuels calls the administration’s arguments “false” and “actively misleading.” Obama’s strategy all along was to give power to Iran, hoping this would reduce U.S. responsibilities in the region, or as Samuels puts it, “would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey.”
Crovitz pointed out that the argument for faith in Iran “was so absurd that it could not be made or even admitted in public of having to —the foreign-policy experts Mr. Rhodes dismisses as the blob would have been astounded at the naïveté of elevating terrorist Iran above allies.” However, the false-narrative strategy worked, justifying what Samuels calls the “brutal contempt” Mr. Rhodes has for journalists. “The average age we talk to is 27 years old and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Mr. Rhodes says. “They literally know nothing,” making them easy to spin.
As explained earlier, Samuels describes how Mr. Rhodes and his team “ventriloquize” sympathetic columnists and reporters. The administration’s media “compadres” acted as “force multipliers.” Another White House official brags of an “echo chamber” of cheerleaders for the Iran deal at think tanks who “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Samuels pointed out that the Obama administration found it easy to manipulate an “information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about.” Obama’s serious foreign-policy advisers seem to be taken aback by what happened under their watch.
Pamela Geller explained that Iran nuclear deal was based on a lie. She stated the following: “It was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program but about radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East. In other words, abandoning our allies and empowering our enemies. Obama’s reign of terror will be keenly felt long after he is gone from the White House.”
Ben Rhodes and Cuba
It was the inexperienced and arrogant liar Ben Rhodes who led 18-months negotiations with Cuba’s bloody regime in Ottawa, Toronto, and Rome. He kept senior diplomats and officials as well as Congress in the dark. His counter-part on the Cuban side was Raul Castro’s son and senior Ministry of the Interior official, Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín.
The website Capitol Hills Cuban stated the following: “In other words, Obama’s young, inexperienced, prep-school fiction writer, which is defined by his colleagues in the NYT profile as having no poker face, led the negotiation versus some of the most seasoned and manipulative intelligence officials in the world. Since then, any senior State Department diplomats who have expressed caution or concern have been marginalized by Rhodes. Meanwhile, concerns over the legality of certain measures by career Treasury officials have been overruled by Rhodes. As The Washington Post‘s Chuck Lane astutely tweeted: One thought apropos NYT Ben Rhodes profile: Raúl Castro, and his son (Rhodes negotiating partner), eat people like this for breakfast. And indeed they did. Regardless how you feel about sanctions, it’s indisputable that the Obama Administrations (led by Rhodes) got rolled by the Castro regime.”
Obama, with the help of Rhodes, has given the Castro’s bloody regime a series of unilateral concessions with nothing in return. In exchange for an American hostage, Alan Gross, who was imprisoned for giving cellular phones to Jews in Havana, the Obama administration sent Castro three convicted spies including one serving a life sentence for the murder of Americans.
What else did Castro regime get? The website Capitol Hills Cuban said the following: “It removed Cuba from the state-sponsors of terrorism list (while still harboring terrorists, including one of the FBI’s Most Wanted); diplomatic recognition; eased travel sanctions for Castro’s military-owned tourism monopolies; access to international dollar transactions (to shuffle illicit gains); stolen trademark recognition (to continue encouraging larceny); a two-year pass for stealing a U.S. Hellfire missile (shared with our foes); and international legitimacy (that has resulted in over $30 billion in foreign debt relief) And the Cuban people? They are getting record-numbers of political arrests, a migration crisis, less economic reforms, tenfold religious persecution, over 200 demolished churches and a new generation of Castros (blessed by the Obama Administration) in control. Oh, not to mention Chanel and the Kardashians mocking Cubans’ repression and misery. Great job, Ben.”
Conclusion
It is very alarming how Rhodes sold the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran by creating a false claim of “moderate” Iranian officials. It was shameful how the liar, arrogant, and inexperience Rhodes bragged about keeping Obama’s long-standing plan to elevate Iran over allies, such as Israel and the Gulf States, hidden from the public by manipulating liberal journalists and think-tank analysts and using the short attention span of social media to obfuscate the truth.
Obama has misled the public on many issues including Benghazi, the war in Libya and against the Islamic State, the Middle Eastern gunrunning operation, Fast and Furious, IRA harassment, ObamaCare, and immigration policy. Now we see up close how the administration’s manipulation extends even to the most important change to U.S. foreign policy in decades.
Also shameful were the Obama-Rhodes unilateral concessions to the bloody regime in Cuba without a “Quid Pro Quo,” or nothing in return. What do you expect when a former community organizer with a Marxist ideology, assisted by an arrogant White House official, conduct the foreign policy of the nation? Sadly, both of them were able to successfully manipulate the increasingly incompetent leftist media and unconstitutionally bypass Congress.
