Ben Rhodes (and Trump) To The American People: SUCKERS! *Open Thread*

Oh, yes he did. Rhodes, you may recall, is the failed novelist-turned-speechwriter-turned-deputy-national-security-adviser who proposed the DISASTROUS “Arab Spring,” and who, in my humble opinion, was enabled in getting a position he had no business getting because his bro, David, is the head of CBS News. See how that works? Comfy arrangement, that.

But before I get to the title piece, I have to highlight yet another idiotic, assholic comment out of the mouth of Donald Trump. I’m sorry – I am sick to death of him, too. But now that he is the presumptive nominee with everyone acting like the Convention has come and gone, he comments are hard to miss.

This time, Trump is claiming that he will be better for women than Clinton. He is claiming, while referring to himself in the third person (GAG) that he LOVES women. And then Trump says this:

[…]

“Just remember that when you’re watching these phony, paid-for-by Wall Street ads, put out by Hillary Clinton on Donald Trump. And just remember, I said it: There is nobody that has more respect for women than me,” Trump said.

He cited high-ranking women in his own company, including his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and said he sometimes pays women more than men who work in similar positions.

“I have women — frankly, I shouldn’t say this because the men are going to get angry, but — I have women that make more money than men doing comparable jobs,” Trump said. “Men, am I OK saying that?”

“The women get it better than we do, folks,” Trump told the crowd. […] (Click here to read the rest.)

Yeah. Uh huh. Thanks for sharing. It won’t matter one whit to those followers, though.

And that kind of thing is not new for Trump. He speaks of how much he loves and respects women one minute, and then makes disgusting comments like those below as George Will noted in a recent column:

[…] Today, Trump trails Hillary Clinton among women by 19 points (35 percent to 54 percent), and most women probably do not yet know that he testifies to the excellence of his penis. (“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body.”) Or that his idea of masculinity is to boast about conquests of women “often seemingly very happily married.” Or that he says “it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” […] (Click here to read the rest.)

What a guy. Yeah, he loves women SOOO much – as they reflect on him as objects and to his sexual prowess, sure. Blech, ugh, yech. THAT is who a third of Republicans think should be President.

 

As noted in the title, Trump is far from the only one pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. That would be what Ben Rhodes helped Obama do with the horrible, terrible, obscene Iran deal. Yep. Rhodes is already gleefully acknowledging what suckers Americans are for falling for that dreadful deal. From David Reaboi’s piece in The Federalist:

[…]

How would the American people react to knowing that an administration, then still stinging from Republican critiques of its anti-Americanism and weakness on the world stage, was holding secret negotiations in Oman with the most powerful still-standing member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”?

Under these conditions, Obama—with the help of an equally arrogant 38-year-old national security fabulist, Ben Rhodes (with whom he’s said to “mind-meld”)—succeeded in remaking the Middle East to empower America’s most hated enemy, the only United Nations member state committed to the annihilation of another state: the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran.

Rhodes and Obama knew that, for anyone but the hard-left to accept a deal with America’s bitter enemy in Tehran, a new narrative needed to emerge, even if it was relatively transparent nonsense. As Rhodes explained to his bemused interviewer, David Samuels, in a New York Times Magazine profile this weekend, it was first necessary to lie to a corrupted and inexperienced American media about all sorts of things, beginning with the nature and intentions of the enemy Iranian regime. Subsequent lies were caked on, as the White House took advantage of a dangerous mix of journalists’ ignorance, their ideological and partisan commitment to the administration, and, finally, their career aspirations.

Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns… They literally know nothing.” Thus they will believe what he tells them. He also tells friendly non-governmental organizations and think tanks what he is telling the journalists. Those outlets produce “experts” whose expert opinion is just what Rhodes wants it to be. These ignorant young journalists thus have quotes that look like independent confirmation of the White House’s lies…

That is just the tip of the iceberg of what Rhodes and the Obama Administration did. Reaboi goes into great length all the ways in which the Administration and Rhodes built lie upon lie upon lie and how the mindless stenographers masking as journalists dutifully copied it all down and got us into this mess.

Here’s the thing. This didn’t just happen with Iran, but the country as a whole:

[…]

Reconstructing the truth isn’t new for Rhodes who, based on Samuels’ account, still clings to the juvenile literary tastes and the mock rebellious pose of the Williamsburg hipster he once was. Samuels writes,

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, ‘We saw that as our entire job.’

It’s a fair bet that most Americans didn’t sign onto a duplicitous “larger restructuring of the American narrative” by junior fiction writers when they sent Obama to the White House in 2008. But it’s what the country got and, thanks to Rhodes’ work creating his “force multipliers” of freshly minted star journalists and partisan experts, will continue to get. […]  (Click here to read the rest.)

Wow, right??

This is an important article, and I cannot do it justice here, but I highly recommend reading it in its entirety. It is eye-opening, even for those of us who are already feeling just a tad cynical.

And this kind of thing will just continue no matter which one of the front runners makes it into the Oval Office, don’t you think?

This is an Open Thread…

Tags: Ben Rhodes, David Rhodes, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Iran, President Obama, Women, Women and Equal Pay