NYT, Ben Rhodes, The Organizer, etc.

The much ballyhooed NYT piece on Ben Rhodes and The Organizer’s deliberate disinformation campaign with respect to the Iran Deal is quite shocking. If W had done this, CNN would be covering it 24/7.

The sheer contempt with which Rhodes and his Master hold ‘The Blob’ (i.e., anyone who disagrees with Barry on… anything) is quite striking. As is the read-between-the-line quotes from Leon Panetta about  his time in the WH, and the degree to which communications personnel, such as Rhodes, influence The Organizer’s foreign policy decision-making.

Having been mentioned in the Samuels piece as one of Rhodes’ media lackeys, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg protests, noting:

I also told Silverstein of my unhappy history with Samuels. I won’t bore you with this sad story, but five years ago, his wife, Alana Newhouse, offered me a position at Tablet Magazine, which she edits. I accepted the job, but then I quickly came to feel that she and David—he was a senior editor at Tablet—weren’t dealing with me in a straightforward way on a number of fronts, and, ultimately, I chose to stay atThe Atlantic. Since that time, I have been the intermittent target of criticism inTablet, and a more-than-intermittent target of Samuels’s personal animus. (He is not particularly careful about sharing his negative opinions of me—or others, by the way—with people who are friends of mine). Samuels should have disclosed this history to the reader.

So, an element of this story that we need to be cognizant of appears to be tied up in the Jewishness of it all. Samuels is Jewish, as is Rhodes, Silverstein, Goldberg, and various other central characters.

Perceived snubs in the way of the very Jewish magazine Tablet appears to be, believe it or not, a potential factor in the unfolding of this very significant news cycle item.

On a different note, this quote from Goldberg cracked me up:

I would say that Carlos Lozada’s evisceration of the piece in The Washington Post—published under the non-subtle headline, “Why the Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times Magazine is just gross”—captures many of my feelings about it, particularly about its aesthetic shortcomings. One of the substance-related oddities of the piece is that it doesn’t address what is actually Rhodes’s most concrete accomplishment in government—leading the secret negotiations that restored diplomatic relations with Cuba. This is a controversial accomplishment—many of the administration’s critics believe that it ceded too much to the Cuban government in the course of these negotiations, but it is an actual accomplishment, one that provides insight into what could be called the Obama Doctrine.

What Goldberg heralds as a wonderful development of the ‘Obama Doctrine’ is actually another seminal example of Obama giving away all his negotiating leverage by having communicated beforehand his intense desire to strike a deal at any cost.

With respect to the Cuba deal, the hugely asymmetrical relationship between the two countries should have led to significant concessions by Cuba, instead of… well… zero concessions.

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