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Home Front: WoT

Incompetent or Malevolent?

2016-05-07

The New York Times has an article describing how Ben Rhodes, President Obama,s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, sold fiction as truth in communicating the president's foreign policy.

Thomas Ricks, writing in Foreign Policy, calls the article "a stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president's foreign policy guru."

That article is below.

But it is also a profile of the president. As David Samuels wrote in the NYT source article, Rhodes saw himself as a reflection of the president:

Rhodes is the reflection. Obama is the originating image. Rhodes is just a flunky who transcribes what the president dictates. Still the Samuels article, by printing the administration's admission of its willful deception on Iran policy, provides crucial insight into the fascinating subject of whether Barack Obama -- if you believe he is a failure -- is incompetent or malevolent.

At first glance the admission that the administration lied to the public seems a slam-dunk case for malevolence. But there's more to it than that. There is a perception that political imbecility is a lesser offense than malice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi activist, while in prison waiting to be executed, reflected that "stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice" because evil left behind in its conscious perpetrators "a sense of unease."

Against true imbecility even reasoning was useless since you couldn't even appeal to your enemy's self interest because they were too dumb to see it. "Against stupidity we are defenseless," he wrote, because imbeciles never feel a qualm. Against the stupid "neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything ... reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict ... simply do not need to be believed ... and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack."

It's worse than all that.

Rhodes and his people (and he had a nice team of staffers) played the MSM. He called them what they were: inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears kids. Noobs. Stupid kids with stupid degrees from high-priced colleges that didn't educate them. They were there to be played, and he played them. He understood them after all, he's one of them -- just a little smarter, maybe, and with mentors who knew how to direct him. Jarrett. Axelrod. Plouffe. And of course, Obama himself. Rhodes was a tool -- a computer calibrated, finely crafted tool. Obama and his team used Rhodes as a tool on the MSM, and it worked. Gloriously. Far better than any of them could hope.

But it's worse than that. Those kid reporters? Whores, the lot of them. Or wannabe whores. As Glenn Reynolds calls them, Democratic operatives with bylines.

When this story broke the MSM had a choice: they could stand up on their hind legs, protest, and trash Rhodes for revealing what he revealed. Or they could pick up the twenty on the bedside table and remain quiet.

Yes, that sound you hear: crickets...

Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#1 Incompetent or Malevolent?

Embrace the healing power of "And", to quote Instapundit.

Posted by: nguard 2016-05-07 20:36

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