Jews telling their Stories and the Arabs' too

If you want to know why the media and the politics in America are screwed up to the extent that they are, there is a good place for you to start the self-teaching process on this subject. It is the editorial page of the New York Times where you'll find two telling articles published lately.

One article came under the title: “The Israel Defense Forces vs. the People of Israel,” written by Shmuel Rosner, and published on May 11, 2016. The other came under the title: “The Arab Withering,” written by Roger Cohen, and published the next day, May 12, 2016.

Rosner is an Israeli who lives in Israel and writes regularly for the readers of the American publication the New York Times. He tells them all about the good and bad things he witnesses in Israel. Being a master spin doctor, he specializes in letting the American readers know how superior the good things are in Israel, and how trivial the bad things are.

Imagine what used to be a Palestinian Garden of Eden called the West Bank of the Jordan River, now turned into a hellhole occupied by Jewish settlers that came mostly from America, a superpower that regularly supplies the Israeli army and the settlers with weapons galore. Worse, this happens at the same time that the same America makes sure the people of Palestine remain unarmed, unable to defend themselves and totally helpless.

After half a century of life in this Jewish-American snake pit, the Palestinian kids whose grandparents could barely remember the days when they were a free people, started to do what kids under occupation normally do: they resisted the occupation. But how can they fight a murderous animal they encounter in the kitchen; one that comes equipped with night goggles, a radio to call for air support and a machine gun? Well, the kids have learned to be creative. They grabbed kitchen knives and fought the Jewish animals to scare them away.

Mindful of the Nuremberg Trials of yesterday, and of The Hague Criminal Court of today, one Israeli general sought to cover his ass by distancing himself from that horrible situation. He said he saw “similarities between Nazi Germany of the 1930s and Israel today.” He criticized Israeli soldiers emptying a magazine “at 13-year-old girls holding scissors,” and criticized the practice of shooting “wounded Palestinians in the head as they lay on the ground.” But Rosner noted that such actions were approved and encouraged by 82 percent of the Israeli population. There you go; the animals are found in the kitchens and everywhere else.

So then, how does Shmuel Rosner spin all that and make the American readers continue to believe that all is well in Israel? He does it by brushing aside the whole thing, thus erase the negative impressions that were created. He also makes a comment to the effect that “the army has become politicized.” This done he builds on all that in an effort to turn the resulting negative image into a positive one.

That's how he does it: “As politicians turn the army into a political football, the center – that is most of us – watches in horror.” Nice try Shmuel but your math does not add up. If, like you admit, 82 percent of the Israelis are on the bloodthirsty side, it leaves only 18 percent for both the center and the sober side. Assuming you split that 9 percent for each, how does a center of 9 percent represent what you says is “most of us”? Out here in the new world where I live, we still adhere to the old math which says that 9 percent is only 1 in 11, and cannot be viewed as “most of us”.

So much for the Jews telling their story. Now to the Jews telling the Arab story. Roger Cohen begins to tell it with a preamble that describes the start of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Before letting his friend Robert F. Worth – that wrote a book on the subject – tell the rest of it, he repeats a fantasy that the Jews had developed about the Arabs. It is one of the fantasies that enabled the Jews to exploit America financially, militarily and diplomatically. It tells of the Arabs suffering from a festering “humiliation [that] would have been replaced by empowering dignity,” something that did not happen because the Revolution – known as the Arab Spring – stalled or turned into something nefarious.

Smart enough to realize that if he mentions Israel or the Jews at this point, he would flush his presentation down the toilet, Roger Cohen uses the “West” as surrogate to convey the notion that if the Arabs are not letting the Jews do to their legislatures what they do to the American Congress, it is because the Arabs have a problem. He put it like this: “The West might escape its conspiracy-fueled place in the Arab mind as the hypocritical enabler of every iniquity”.

That is, the Arab Spring has failed, he says, and the people did not get “the meaningful citizenship” they hoped for. What this reveals is that in the eyes of the Jews, no country that does not let itself be taken over by the Jews, can claim to give its inhabitants meaningful citizenship. Because no Arab country has done so, it must be that most if not all have abandoned the Arab Spring in favor of the ISIS Caliphate.

This being the case, Roger Cohen who is a regular columnist at the New York Times should now go to his editorial bosses and tell them to stop beating up on Egypt. They must also stop accusing that country of employing a “scorched earth” policy fighting ISIS in the Sinai. Go tell those animals that Egypt has surrendered to ISIS, Roger. They might celebrate and then shut up.

Credit Obama for a Regime change in Iran

Ever since I was a small boy going to Sunday school, it was etched in my memory that a big organization such as a church or a country, for example, will always choose the person most effective to lead it harmoniously during the prevailing times. In fact, no less than the Pope was chosen according to this criterion, we were told, and this is why we had Pope Pius XII as head of the Church at that time.

I became interested in the history that was unfolding before my eyes as I watched (1) UN soldiers board ships that took them to fight in Korea; (2) Friends of the family whose relatives were fighting in Vietnam flinch at the mention of the name Dien Bien Phu; (3) The early ups and downs of Nasser's Revolution in Egypt. And so I tried to match that history with what I had learned about leading a big organization. Alas, I did not have much success for, I was too young to fully understand what I was looking at.

I matured eventually and began to understand why Nasser was revered by his people following the Franco-British invasion of the Suez Canal Zone. Why the French sacked Guy Mollet afterward, and the British sacked Anthony Eden. Why America voted for Eisenhower to be President, why Lyndon Johnson did not run for reelection, and why Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. But nothing helped me understand the Sunday school lesson better than what used to churn in the old Soviet Union and later the new Russia.

I was not a Kremlin watcher in the sense that the term is commonly used, but from the days of Bulganin to the days of Putin, I watched with interest who or what the USSR-cum-Russia chose to be the man or triumvirate deemed best suited to lead the country for the time that the choice was made. And that's when the lesson I had learned as a small boy was finally validated.

How does that help me understand things now? Well, there is a difference between the Vatican, the Russian system and the Iranian system, of course, but all three have one thing in common as far as I can determine. It is that they choose the best suited person they put in charge at the helm of their ship of state to run the jurisdiction in harmony with the prevailing conditions, thus implement their agenda as fully as possible.

This is why I have something to say regarding the content of the column written by Clifford D. May under the title: “Obama's 'boy wonder'” and the subtitle “How Ben Rhodes helped the president betray the trust of the American people,” published on May 10, 2016 in The Washington Times. Because much has already been said about the Ben Rhodes episode, I shall not take up this matter. Instead, I shall concentrate on half a dozen paragraphs that touch on other topics. The paragraphs condense as follows:

“To sell the Iran deal, the public was told there was a new political reality in Iran which brought moderates to power in that country. The intelligence community understood that the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard ran the country with a strong arm. They faced no challenge from a rising moderate faction. Mr. Obama disregarded the intelligence. He and his top foreign policy adviser made up a fictitious narrative that they thought would sell better than the truth. They persuaded journalists that Iran's moderates were open to compromise and eager to improve relations. In fact, however, Obama's envoys had begun negotiating with Iran's rulers long before the elections. Indeed, from his first days in the White House, a time when Ahmadinejad was Iran's president, Mr. Obama's goal was a pivot toward Iran”.

Well, you don't have to be a genius of history to figure out what happened here. It is that Obama's overture to Iran convinced the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard that America was governed by a man who wanted to start an era of peaceful co-existence with them. In response, they did what a Pope or a Khrushchev would have done were they going through similar circumstances.

It is that the Iranians engineered a situation in which Ahmadinejad was eased out of office and replaced by someone who could talk to the Americans and deal with them on the basis of mutual respect. The negotiations began, and everyone proceeded with caution while keeping their powder dry. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry responded positively, the Iranians reciprocated and the deal was eventually made.

Now that this mission is accomplished, we can see that not only did Barack Obama fashion a nuclear deal with Iran, he brought about the regime change in that country many were clamoring for.

He did it without creating the horror show we are witnessing in the Levant at this time, a region where the Jewish style regime change was implemented by another President. This was the change that led to the opening of the gates of hell no one has yet figured out how to close.

Meanwhile, it can no longer be denied that Barack Obama has earned the peace prize awarded to him.

The Ben Rhodes Episode one more Time

One more thing had to be said about the Ben Rhodes episode and it was said. When this happened, it called for a response, and that gave impetus to this presentation.

This time, Richard Cohen said what had to be said. He did so in a column he wrote under the title: “Of pride, falls – and Obama's foreign policy,” published on May 9, 2016 in the Washington Post. What follows is the passage he wrote that called for a response:

“The lie exposed a truth. Obama wanted the deal (almost) no matter what. He had not been beckoned into the talks by more reasonable Iranians, but had initiated them with the previous regime. In other words, he wanted the talks more than the Iranians did – a negotiating position of great weakness. It explains why nothing in the agreement thwarts Iranian efforts to support terrorism in the Middle East or continue to make mayhem in Iraq. It lowers the odds that Iran will continue to adhere to the agreement”.

If you do not recall what was said about the deal while it was negotiated, you should know that many of the articles written at the time were discussed on this website. They can be accessed in the archives on the right side of the page. In short, what was said by a pundit that had “connected the dots,” and was endlessly echo-repeated by every pundit and his copycat apprentice – each of whom had discovered new dots to connect – was that the sanctions brought the Iranians to the negotiating table.

When that notion was hammered securely into the heads of its creators, each pundit took the trouble to advise the Obama administration of a new way to take advantage of the situation because each had determined that the Iranians were negotiating from a position of weakness whereas America was holding a strong hand. And no matter from which direction each pundit approached the discussion, they all converged on the idea that America must take a tougher negotiating stance at the table, and must tighten the sanctions even more. And they speculated that such moves will bring the Iranians to their knees, forcing them to concede more and more.

Go back now and look again what Richard Cohen was saying, having proclaimed that the truth had been exposed: “Obama wanted the deal. He was not beckoned into the talks; he initiated them.” Well, we are left with no choice but to admit that this revelation kills all the determinations and speculations that were fabricated when the “lie” was thought to be the “truth.” And true to Jewish form – in the same way that the pundits of yesterday saw fit to build on the foundation of the prevailing lie – Richard Cohen sees fit now to make new determinations, and to fashion new speculations based on the truth of today.

Thus, he has determined that “nothing in the agreement thwarts Iranian efforts to support terrorism in the Middle East.” And he speculated that nothing will thwart the Iranians from “continuing to make mayhem in Iraq.” And that's not all because there is worse (or perhaps it is a glimmer of hope depending on your point of view) in that the newly discovered truth will “lower the odds that Iran will continue to adhere to the agreement,” says Richard Cohen. Maybe the Iranians will reject the deal, and America's pundits of the echo chamber will have reason to celebrate. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, something that’s even more consequential than all that – if you can believe it – comes out the Ben Rhodes saga. It is that in the hands of those pundits and their apprentices, the truth and the lie are interchangeable in the same way that six-of-one or half-a-dozen of the other can be used to reach the desired outcome. You'll find that in the Richard Cohen column, the desired outcome is explained in a lengthy and drawn out manner over two paragraphs. When condensed, the passages read as follows:

“If Obama can reach understanding with Iran, he can rid himself of the Middle East and pivot elsewhere. American boots will not hit the ground unless to protect American interests … It could be that Obama's foreign policy is brilliant or that the establishment is stuck in the amber of lessons from World War II and the Cold War. I do not know that these lessons are irrelevant to our day. Hitler and Stalin were evil. The sheer inability of U.S. leadership to appreciate that fact doomed millions of people”.

In other words, he says in his subtle way that America must not leave the Middle East – which means must not abandon Israel – to pivot elsewhere, because the Middle East is burning and needs America the fireman to douse the fire.

All we can say to that is: here we go again. We say it because it was the neocon repeated arguments that brought America to set the Middle East on fire in the first place. And you know what, my friend? All those pundits and their apprentices are authentic neocons or neocon-trained echo-repeaters.

For Cohen to come now and ask America to douse that fire is akin to the son of the fireman who set fire to properties then joined the effort to douse the fire. The difference between the two situations is that the Middle Eastern fire will only get worse the longer that Jewish America remains in the region.

Thus, the wish of peace-loving people around the globe should be that America pivot away from the Middle East, and never look back. Just go away. In Arabic – erhal.

Better Ben Rhodes than Nathan Sharansky

Fred Fleitz is foaming at the mouth trying to tell the world that President Obama let Ben Rhodes run the foreign policy of the nation rather than adopt the George W. Bush model of letting Israel's Nathan Sharansky and the so-called children of Holocaust survivors, do the honor. To express his disappointment, Fleitz wrote: “The Sycophantic Political Operative Shaping Obama's Foreign Policy,” an article that was published on May 9, 2016 in National Review Online.

Fleitz can foam all he wants but he knows nothing of what he's talking about, and he convinces no one of what he's saying. After all, the world knows that Ben Rhodes did not recommend the destruction of Iraq or Syria, and neither was he responsible for the death of nearly a million people or the destitution of millions more. What Barack Obama may be guilty of, and what Ben Rhodes has embraced is the dullness of peaceful coexistence among nations. This is what exasperates bloodthirsty Fred Fleitz and all those like him. Let them suffer.

The Bush doctrine relied on old hands such as those that designed the invasion of Iraq a decade before it happened … and did it at a time when W. Bush was still experimenting with marijuana and other hallucinatory drugs. He grew up eventually, ran for election and won. The first big thing he did after inauguration is that he ran around the globe like a headless chicken, and tried to shove the Sharansky witches' brew they call democracy down the throats of the Arabs and the Chinese. Instead of accepting this evil baton and run with it – having succeeded Bush – Barack Obama did something infinitely more intelligent.

First, he surrounded himself with the people that knew how to hunt for and get Osama Bin Laden … and do the other things that decimated the leaderships of both al-Qaeda and ISIS. Second, he recognized that to prevent his foreign policy from being hijacked by those who take their orders from Sharansky's Likud Party, he needed a highly talented and very deft hand to liaise with the outside world so as to keep the American people informed of what he aimed to achieve, and keep the Likud people misinformed as to how well he was succeeding. Obama saw that Ben Rhodes was the talent that could fill the bill, and hired him for the position.

What then could Fleitz say that would diminish the accomplishments of Barack Obama, and denigrate the work of Ben Rhodes? Well, the first thing he did was conflate the informational loop which consists of the White House and the general public, with the loop that consists of the White House and the foreign policy elites such as Fleitz and the gang. Whereas the public wishes to know the intent of their leaders, the elites want to see the details so as to create the noise that will paralyze the ship of state and hand the helm to the Sharanskys and the Likudites of this world.

And so, he begins the presentation with this: “the Obama administration lied about the nuclear deal with Iran.” He then sets out to tell what he insists was the most important lie to come out the White House. Here it is: “The Obama administration claim[ed] that the nuclear deal came about in 2013 … even though the most meaningful part of the negotiations had begun in mid-2012.” Oh gosh, how deceitful!

Deceitful you say? Prove it. How did the masses react to the news that the negotiations with Iran started a year earlier than stated? Well, if that was not stated previously, it has now been so stated, and there is no negative reaction among the general public. The same cannot be said about the loop comprising Fleitz and the rest of the gang, however. These characters are foaming and fuming; and they are inciting the masses to rise and demand that heads roll. But no one is rising, and no one is drooling.

Having made the false claim that “the president has allowed his National Security Council (NSC) staff to run his foreign policy,” Fleitz shoots himself in the foot, telling of John Kerry's account of what really happened. It is that “intense U.S. diplomacy, including 69 trips across the Atlantic” undertaken by himself and by Hillary Clinton is what clinched the deal.

That was a revelation Fred Fleitz could not let stand, and so he dismissed it like this: “efforts by Kerry and Clinton to get a nuclear deal were irrelevant – a deal was always in the cards.” Now you know why people take 69 trips across the Atlantic; they do it to fool the public. Knowing this much is important to you, my friend, which is why you should thank Fred Fleitz for making it available to you and the rest of the public.

But that's no laughing matter when you consider what he and those like him are recommending to the current president and to the next. To Obama, they say this: “fire Rhodes and others in the NSC and hire competent advisers.” They mean hire people like those who engineered the Iraq invasion and the destruction of the Levant.

To the next president, they recommend this: “hire competent advisers and trust [them] to do their jobs.” They mean hire people like those who engineered the Iraq invasion and the destruction of the Levant.

These people never learn and never change but remain hopeless.

Single me out but don't single me out

Nothing is more human than to wish doing to someone what he did to you. If someone gave you a hand when you were at the lowest point of your life, you wish you'll someday be in a position strong enough to pay him back. If someone has done you harm, you wish you'll someday be powerful enough to return the favor, and see to it that justice is done.

You encounter similar scenarios everywhere in life … nowhere more glaringly than during the American presidential campaigns. You will see that these campaigns always start on a civilized note but then deteriorate when a staffer in one of the campaigns commits a gaffe saying something insulting about the other side. That's when the other returns the favor, thus starts an escalation that may go as far as recreate the sexual politics of the 1970s, and lead to the barrage of insults which make allusion to the size of genitals.

You also see something like it happen on the international scene where the language of escalation can involve the repositioning of nuclear missiles and naval fleets. It happened during the Cuban missile crisis long ago; it is happening now in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean involving the NATO forces and the new Russia. And it is happening in the waters of the Western Pacific involving China on one side and the United States with its allies on the other side.

It has also been happening for ever and ever in the very convoluted ways, with which anything that is Jewish or Israeli begins, develops and never ends in a peaceful way. In fact, it is happening at this very moment, and you can get a glimpse of it in the editorial that came under the title: “Hating Jews for sport” and the subtitle: “Iran's leaders pretend a Holocaust cartoon contest isn't what it obviously is.” It was published on May 8, 2016 in the New York Daily News.

The idea behind someone in Iran staging a cartoon contest involving the Jewish taboo of the Holocaust is an obvious response to the Jews in Europe and North America encouraging everyone that wants it to exercise their freedom of speech by drawing cartoons involving the Muslim taboo of depicting their prophet. This Iranian response is a normal human behavior.

The problem is that the Iranians are as human as they get, but not the Jews. The latter come from a human stock like the rest of us; but once they adopt that religion and embrace the tenets that come with it, they set themselves apart and ask to be treated so delicately, it is impossible to touch them without provoking the cry that you're hurting them. That is, one way or the other, they convey the message: Single me out when superlatives of commendation are handed out but don't single me out when adjectives of condemnation are handed out.

You can see in the editorial how the Jews create convoluted techniques to convey that message and confuse the audience. They begin with the cry: “annihilation of six million Jews” and then go into this passage: “The event grows from the malignant culture of ... call[ing] for wiping Israel off the map and whose missiles have born the legend “Death to Israel.”

As can be seen, the editors first insulted the Iranian regime and then buttressed their view with two deceptions. The truth is that the Iranians only called for a regime change in occupied Palestine, something that Jews do all the time about everyone they don't like. Also, the Iranians normally utter “death to whomever” by cultural habit in the same way that we tell someone annoying to drop dead. Only a pansy would be irritated by that … and Jews love to be irritated by that and by many other things.

Sinking as low as when the presidential campaigns start referring to the genitals, the editors of the Daily News engage in their own form of intellectual masturbation. Here it is: “He [Foreign Minister Zarif] said so just as Iranian courts sentenced four journalists to prison;” they, being journalists who are usually “supportive of the government.” But what is it that Zarif had said? He said this: “The Iranian government has nothing to do with the competition.” What? What the hell is that?

What is the connection between the holding of a Holocaust competition, and journalists being sentenced in a court of law? Nothing except that it is a smart aleck trick used here to help the editors pave the way for finishing the editorial on the following meaningless note: “Zarif's statement was not just a lie. It was a Big lie, one that would be bitterly felt by the four journalists imprisoned in Iran.” Again, there is not here even an attempt to show what connects the two incidents. That's because there is none.

But how do the editors of the Daily News hope to serve their Jewish and Israeli causes? They help in two ways by juxtaposing that presentation with subtle insinuations that supposedly speak for themselves.

The first insinuation is this: “Zarif became Kerry's buddy. The two speak regularly as Tehran demands that U.S. convince the world to trade with Iran.” The message here is this: stop helping Iran live a normal life.

The second insinuation is this: “The sponsor asked why the Palestinian people should pay the price and their territories be occupied by the Zionist regime?” The message here is this: The Palestinians must be made to understand that the Jews are the chosen children of God. When they want something, they take it and no one can object to that.

And my Jewish friend throws his hands up in the air and screams: Light up the oven.

Between understanding and engineering History

What follows is a real-life example that constitutes an excellent lesson on how not to handle history.

It is also an example that shows why the Jews are incapable of understanding history. In brief, it is because they begin with “religious” beliefs to which they hang on like dogma. And they connect fictitious dots that flow out of prejudices they consider to be divine promises. They make decisions based on all that, and chart a course to engineer a desired (read promised) outcome.

What the Jews reject is the reality that this approach – perhaps minus the religious component – is the very foundation on which authoritarian rule is built. It is why dictators (individuals or mass movements) always learn the bitter lesson that they cannot engineer history. What happens to the Jews eventually is that they get surprised when they see that history is made of random events which may or may not converge at some point. If they do, unforeseen consequences make the unexpected happen. And this is why history can only be understood in hindsight when all is said and done.

That lesson comes to us courtesy of the editors of the New York Daily News who apparently discovered in the profile of Benjamin (Ben) Rhodes that was written by David Samuels of the New York Times, a number of reasons to attack their two favorite targets: Their own American President, Barack Obama, and Israel's nemesis in the Middle East, the nation of Iran.

The editors did so in a piece they wrote under the title: “Obama's Iran scam” and the subtitle: “The President hard sale of the nuclear deal with the mullahs has chock full of spin and half-truths,” published on May 7, 2016. They level these accusations because they say they found “plenty” of evidence to that effect in the Rhodes profile, which they characterize as being “extraordinarily revealing”.

Ben Rhodes is the deputy national security adviser that handled the liaison between the White House and the media during the time that the negotiations were ongoing between Iran and the P5+1 nations, which included the United States. What was revealed about Rhodes, say the editors of the Daily News, is that he knew something very serious about Barack Obama, and did not reveal it to the public till after the fact.

Are you ready for it, my friend? Here it is: Rhodes always understood that Obama wanted to “remake U.S. relations in the Mideast,” ever since the beginning of his presidency. And he was eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012 to reach this goal. Whoa! How very serious is that!

What the editors of the Daily News are furious about is that they believe Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes – working hand in hand with the Iranians – engineered this whole thing when in fact, it was no more than a classic example of how characters and events converge randomly to create a historical happening that nobody could have foreseen ahead of time. The astonishing part is that the editors of the tabloid exactly describe how history played itself out, and yet fail to see that it was fashioned by neither the hand of Obama nor that of Rhodes.

Look how elements of that deal had been in the making decades before it all came together. Here is the editors' own recitation of that history: (1) Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earned a PhD in Scotland long ago and then took office only in 2013. (2) Iranian Foreign Minister Mahammad Zarif was educated at American universities. (3) He cultivated a close relationship with America's Secretary of State, John Kerry.

Now, given that John Kerry turned pacifist – having fought in the very unpopular Vietnam War – and given that Barack Obama had an upbringing that made him a pacifist by nature, the two Americans “converged” in time and space with the two Iranians, Rouhani and Zarif, and worked with them to make the nuclear deal happen.

It was this convergence of characters and events which made it inevitable that the four should forge a deal which, by everyone's calculation, has avoided a war in the Middle East so terrible; it would have made previous wars in the region look like child play.

As to the role that Benjamin Rhodes played in this saga, he was only a messenger. He was the town crier whose job was to proclaim history's edicts to the media and the public, helping them understand what was happening. Don't shoot him; he has done nothing wrong.

Ben Rhodes, the gifted White House Aid

If you don't want to read a 9,500 words article but wish to learn what goes on inside the White House at the foreign policy level, you have a shorter alternative. It is a 1,060-word article discussing the long article.

The long one came under the title: “The Aspiring Novelist who became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru” and the subtitle: “How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.” It was written by David Samuels and published in the New York Times Magazine on May 5, 2016.

Lee Smith of the Weekly Standard then wrote a 1,060 words article reviewing the long one. It came under the title: “Obama's Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal,” published on May 5, 2016 in the Weekly Standard. I read both articles and felt compelled to make a few comments of my own about the entire subject matter.

The foreign Policy Guru that's mentioned in the title of the Smith article is Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes who is responsible for the success of the messaging that was done by the White House regarding the Iran Nuclear Deal. He is such a gifted man, says Samuels, he did a magnificent job selling the deal to the public by throwing off those who could have opposed it because they were mostly of the media and mostly clueless.

Thus, David Samuels has asserted, and Lee Smith has agreed that the American public was sold on the deal at the time that it was signed, sealed and delivered. Because nothing has changed since that time, we must accept the reality that the public continues to support it. This being the case, it is mystifying that Lee Smith should end his presentation the way that he did. Here is what he says:

“For seven years the America public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe – they are”.

That passage is self-contradictory in several places, and should make the Smith presentation suspect in the eyes of readers. This is because, deceived or not, a public that has accepted the Rhodes narrative could not feel unsafe thinking that the deal was a bad one.

Moreover, neither Samuels nor Smith took the trouble to explain how a lone White House operative – no matter how unspeakably cynical he may have been – could tell lies about the Iranian regime, and fool thousands of media types as well as millions of Americans by framing “the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war,” and then set up “a messaging unit that created an 'echo chamber' in the press”. This is unreal.

When you look closely at what Samuels and Smith have said, you begin to realize that the media types and the American public knew exactly what was going on, and have contributed mightily to the success of the nuclear negotiations. Here is the passage that says this much: “Rhodes is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional media”.

That is, faced with the public desire for an accommodation with Iran – as expressed by a tsunami that came through the social media – the operators of the traditional media stepped aside and let their sand castles be washed away by the wave. For this reason, it makes sense for us to think that Ben Rhodes did nothing cynical, but that he rode the wave of the public's desire to see the negotiations succeed, and used that reality to subdue the voices that opposed the deal.

No wonder Ben Rhodes feels good about his work as revealed by David Samuels: “He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. ’We drove them crazy,' he said of the deal's opponents.'” The truth is that Rhodes could not have accomplished that much if the public was not with him, or if the traditional media had bought the opposition's narrative rather than the one advanced by Rhodes and by the White House.

In short, Ben Rhodes did not lie as claimed by Lee Smith. He accomplished his mission because that's what the public wanted, and he was dedicated to his work.