JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: The New York Times profiles Ben “Lonesome*” Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, or as they dub him “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru,” who all but tells the Grady Lady their reporting stinks on ice:
The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “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.”
As John Podhoretz writes at the New York Post in response to Rhodes making perhaps the ultimate Kinsley gaffe, “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.”
Tough break, Juicebox Mafia; you did everything you could for Obama, but he and his staffers still have no respect for such cheap dates, especially as they kick back and play out the remaining string until January.
As for Rhodes’ foreign policy skills — or the lack thereof — Ace of Spades has you more than covered, as he fisks wide swatches of the article, including this passage:
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.
Gee, wait ’till the Times discovers who Rhodes’ boss is.
But wait, there’s more! “Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal,” Lee Smith writes at the Weekly Standard: “Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg’s picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president’s willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes’s boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and others call a ‘narrative’—that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.”
* Sorry, cheap joke. Though to be fair, the real Lonesome Rhodes spent his last days as an Obamacare pitchman, thus bringing his career full circle.