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In 2006 Interview, Trump Demanded US Troops Leave Iraq—Even if Chaos and ISIS-Like Violence Occurred

by Rad7edzw Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, Donald Trump repeatedly asserted that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of ISIS and blasted Hillary Clinton as a “co-founder” of the terror group that has taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. But Obama was not in the White House and Clinton was not secretary of state when ISIS originated.

When a conservative radio host on Thursday asked if Trump meant that the Obama administration had “created the vacuum” in the region that allowed ISIS to grow, the GOP nominee stuck to his nonsensical statement: “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS.” Next, Trump claimed he was being sarcastic. Then at a campaign rally, he added, “But not that sarcastic.” It was a very Trumpian couple of days. And on Monday, with a speech on national security that Trump read off a teleprompter, he had a chance to declare what he really thought about Obama, Clinton, and ISIS. After repeating the lie that he had opposed the Iraq War before the invasion, Trump did not restate his “founder” claim, but he said that because of Obama and Clinton, “Iraq is in chaos, and ISIS is on the loose.” He added, “the Obama-Clinton foreign policy has unleashed ISIS.” He insisted that Obama’s withdrawal of US troops from Iraq (which actually was compelled by an agreement reached with the Iraqi government by President George W. Bush) “led directly to the rise of ISIS.”

Here’s the problem for Trump—if being wildly inconsistent and attacking an opponent for supposedly holding a position that Trump himself once advocated is a problem: 10 years ago, Trump called for a complete US withdrawal of troops from Iraq and indicated that he didn’t give a damn if this led to civil war and greater violence there. He even predicted that such a move would cause the rise of “vicious” forces in Iraq. But Trump believed this would not be the United States’ problem. That is, Trump was ardently in favor of the very actions that he now decries and for which he wrongfully blames Obama and Clinton.

In a 2006 CNBC interview, Trump was asked to critique Bush’s performance in the White House. Trump immediately brought up the Iraq War:

I would like to see our president get us out of the war in Iraq because the war is a total catastrophe. I would like to see President Bush get us out of Iraq, which is a total mess, a total catastrophe, and it’s not going to get any better. It’s only going to get worse. It’s a mess.

Trump was passionate and insistent. Bush had to get the hell out of Iraq right away:

What you have to do is get out of Iraq. You can do it nicely. You can do it slowly. You can do it radically.

Trump fancied the do-it-fast approach. And he noted that a US withdrawal should proceed, even though it would precipitate more violence in the region and the worst and most violent forces would benefit. It’s almost as if Trump foresaw the rise of ISIS—but didn’t believe that this mattered for the United States:

I would announce that we have been victorious in Iraq and all the troops are coming home and let those people have their civil war. And, by the way, no matter if we stay or if we leave, the most vicious person that you’ve ever seen in your—. Saddam Hussein is going to be like a nice guy compared to the one who’s taking over Iraq. Somebody will take over Iraq, whether we’re there or not, but probably when we leave, will take over Iraq. He will make Saddam Hussein…He will make Saddam Hussein look like a baby.

In his characteristic manner, Trump did not mince his words and he reiterated his solution:

I just said, announce victory, get them home…Let’s say, “Victory, Tremendous.” Have a big thing in the streets. Then get out real fast before you get shot. Let’s get home…Hey, hate us over there. Now how, how, do you—. The people that like us hate us. Those are the good ones. Then you have the double hate where they wanna just shoot us. But how do you solve that problem? You got to get out of Iraq.

Trump was clear at the time: The United States had to remove its troops, even if that would cause a civil war and a dramatic expansion of violence and terror in Iraq and the region. Now he denounces Obama and Clinton, who were not in charge of US foreign policy at that time, for supposedly implementing the policy he demanded. By Trump’s own standards—sarcastic or not—he is at least an honorary founder of ISIS.

Watch Trump take the exact position he now slams as “naive” and an example of “bad judgment”:

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In 2006 Interview, Trump Demanded US Troops Leave Iraq—Even if Chaos and ISIS-Like Violence Occurred

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Bill O’Reilly Had the Worst Response to Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech

by MagdalenaTurriff Posted on July 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama delivered a stirring speech that was widely praised on both sides of the aisle. Even Donald Trump commended the first lady’s performance, despite being the unnamed target of her forceful rebuke.

But there was one line in her remarks that Fox News historian Bill O’Reilly felt needed more explanation. The line below:

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” Obama said. “And I watch my daughters—two beautiful, intelligent, black young women—playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. Because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.”

On his show Tuesday, O’Reilly lauded Obama for “referring to the evolution of America in a positive way.” But he then proceeded to fact-check her statement in a way that appeared to excuse the US government’s use of slave labor.

“Slaves that worked there were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802,” he said. “However, the feds did not forbid subcontractors from using slave labor. So Michelle Obama is essentially correct in citing slaves as builders of the White House, but there were others working as well. Got it?”

And there you have it—the worst response to Michelle Obama’s 2016 Democratic National Convention address.

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Bill O’Reilly Had the Worst Response to Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech

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Obama reminds us things are getting better all the time

by EtsukoTunbridge Posted on July 20, 2016

obamaptimist

Obama reminds us things are getting better all the time

By on Jul 20, 2016Share

It’s not common knowledge, but the Obama administration has been a powerhouse in fighting poverty abroad. The president hasn’t talked much about this — probably because modern Republicans reflexively oppose anything he supports (up to and including otter cuddling). Now, he’s opening up.

At the White House Summit on Global Development on Wednesday, Obama laid out his administration’s achievements. His Power Africa initiative is on track to connect 60 million homes and businesses to the electrical grid by 2030. The Feed the Future program has brought new seeds and tools to small farmers in 19 countries, boosting incomes by $800 million. In areas where Feed the Future was operating in 2015, the number of people in poverty dropped by a quarter, and the number of children permanently injured by malnutrition dropped by as much as a third. Anti-malaria efforts have saved some 6 million lives and the goal of a completely AIDS-free generation is within reach, Obama said.

As the speakers at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland paint a picture of a world in decline, Obama pointed out that we are living in the “most prosperous, most progressive era in human history.” This world may seem like a viper pit, but it’s really a pool full of cuddly otters.

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Obama reminds us things are getting better all the time

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Why This GOP Convention Is the Most Dangerous One Ever

by oytaliza3064 Posted on July 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Lock her up! Lock her up!”

This is when the Republican National Convention turned dangerous. Hundreds of Republican delegates on the floor of the convention during the official proceedings were shouting that the opposing candidate, Hillary Clinton, should be thrown in jail. The GOPers weren’t merely urging her defeat in November. They were demanding she be treated as a criminal and sent to the hoosegow. This moment marked the culmination of a meme on the right: that Clinton is not a legitimate leader and that her election would not be legitimate. By embracing this theme and placing it center stage at Trumpalooza, Donald Trump and the GOP were undermining, if not threatening, democratic governance.

It’s not news that the Trump movement has been laced with violence and extremism—and it has hit a fever pitch at the convention this week. On Tuesday night, minutes after the “lock her up” chants, defeated GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson linked Clinton to Lucifer (because of a college paper she wrote on leftist organizer Saul Alinsky). And on Wednesday morning, the news broke that a prominent Trump supporter, Al Baldasaro, had declared on a radio show that Clinton deserved to “be put in the firing line and shot for treason.” Baldasaro had repeatedly spoken at Trump rallies during the primary campaign, and when the New Hampshire GOP delegation cast its votes for Trump during the roll call vote on Tuesday evening, he stood next to Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, as Lewandowski enthusiastically read off the tally for Trump. And Trump once referred to Baldasaro as “my favorite vet.” So here we have a top Trump champion advocating murderous violence.

The call for Clinton’s execution is not as shocking as it should be. (Some Trump voters are down with this.) Hillary’s demonization has been the central organizing principle of the convention. (On Tuesday night, there were far more anti-Clinton speeches than pro-Trump presentations.) Delegates trot about Cleveland wearing “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts and badges. Vendors tell me these are the best-selling merch. On the floor, delegates wave “Hillary for Prison” signs, and no convention staffers stop them. Trumpers routinely state as a fact that Clinton has committed treason—they need not explain how: Benghazi, the emails, the Clinton Foundation, whatever—and ought to be punished for her crimes. The only reason she is not, they say, is that President Barack Obama and the corrupt federal government are protecting her. It’s all one big evil plot.

Within the ranks of Trump Nation, Clinton’s guilt has long been a given. In 2014, Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, tweeted, “Hillary must be brought to justice—arrested, tried and executed for murder.” At a pro-Trump rally he helped organize in Cleveland on Monday, Stone, after saying he had just met with Trump staffers, declared that Clinton had mounted a cover-up in the death of Vince Foster, a White House aide who committed suicide during the Bill Clinton presidency. Stone stated as a fact that she had ordered Foster’s body secretly moved from the White House to a park outside Washington. (The official investigations of the time concluded that Foster had killed himself in this park.) “We demand the prosecution of Bill and Hillary Clinton for their crimes,” Stone shouted, to the cheers of the crowd. He declared the Clintons had committed “treason.”

At this event, Alex Jones, a prominent conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther, decried Hillary Clinton as part of a secretive global conspiracy seeking world domination. He shouted his catch phrase: “The answer to 1984 is 1776.” This was essentially a message of violence—a warning that citizens might have to take up arms against the governing elite to prevent tyranny. In other words, if Clinton triumphs, be ready to lock and load. (This has long been a deeply held notion on the right: We must keep our guns in case one day it is necessary to fight the wicked federal government.)

Trump has encouraged all this. By regularly referring to Clinton as “Crooked Hillary,” he signals that she deserves indictment and that a Clinton victory in November will not be acceptable. He has denounced the “rigged system” over and over. Well, what happens when a “rigged system” yields an outcome in which a “crooked” politician who ought to be imprisoned ends up in the White House? How can Trump and his followers abide by that? How could any patriot stand by and allow such a travesty to occur?

Trump’s convention has given voice to the most extremist portions of the right. It has sharpened the partisan divide. It has cast Clinton as a figure who cannot be allowed to take the White House—even if somehow she collects more votes (or the “rigged system” says she collects more votes). Trump has established a term sheet for this election that establishes an alarming dichotomy: If he wins, the process worked; if she wins, the game is corrupt and the results cannot be trusted. This is a perilous moment. There is talk of killing a presidential nominee and a foundation is being set for delegitimizing an election. And the convention is only halfway over.

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Why This GOP Convention Is the Most Dangerous One Ever

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

by denesefetherston Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Richie Pope

One morning in April 2015, Rayid Ghani was sitting among more than a dozen big-city police chiefs and officials in a fourth-floor conference room across the street from the White House. It was the latest in a series of meetings about curbing police abuses that the Obama administration had urgently called. The day before, a cellphone video had emerged showing a white South Carolina cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back, sparking another wave of Black Lives Matter protests and eventually prompting an FBI investigation. Ghani didn’t know much about law enforcement, having spent most of his career studying human behavior—things like grocery shopping, learning, and voting. But the Pakistani-born data scientist and University of Chicago professor had an idea for how to stop the next police shooting.

Back when he worked for the consulting company Accenture, Ghani had figured out how to guess the final price of an eBay auction with 96 percent accuracy. In 2012, he served on Obama’s reelection campaign, pinpointing supporters who were most likely to shell out donations. Ghani now believed he could teach machines to predict the likelihood that cops would abuse their power or break the law. It was, he thought, “low-hanging fruit.”

Experts have long understood that only a small fraction of cops are responsible for the bulk of police misconduct. In 1981, when research showed that 41 percent of Houston’s citizen complaints could be traced to 12 percent of the city’s cops, the US Civil Rights Commission encouraged every police department to find their “violence-prone officers.” Ever since, most major departments have set up a system to identify so-called bad apples. These systems typically use software to flag officers who have received a lot of citizen complaints or have frequently used force. But each department’s model is different and no one really knows how well any of them work. Some may overlook officers with many red flags, while others may target cops who haven’t broken any rules. What’s more, the police chiefs at the White House meeting had a hunch that the bad apples were gaming their systems.

Ghani saw a different problem: The departments simply weren’t using enough data. So he made the top cops gathered in Room 430 an offer. If they handed over all the data they’d collected on their officers, he’d find a better way to identify the bad cops.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina signed up, agreeing to give Ghani and his team 15 years’ worth of personnel records and other data, provided that its officers’ identities remained anonymous. Charlotte was a good test lab for Ghani’s project. It had also had two recent police shootings; the case against one officer ended in a mistrial, and the other officer was never charged.

Since 2001, Charlotte had flagged officers for review based on certain criteria, like if the cop had used physical force against a suspect three or more times over the past 90 days. Once an officer was flagged, an internal affairs team would decide whether to issue a warning or to notify his supervisor. But the criteria were built on “a gut feeling,” explains Chief Kerr Putney. “It was an educated guess, but it was a guess nonetheless. We didn’t have any science behind it.” When Ghani’s team interviewed cops and supervisors, almost everyone said the system failed to account for factors like what neighborhoods the officers patrolled or which shifts they worked.

The system also created a lot of false positives, dinging more than 1,100 cops out of a 2,000-person force. “The officers felt like we were accusing them when they didn’t do anything wrong,” Putney says. Out on the street, cops were concerned accidents or even justified uses of force might be seen as foul play. When Ghani’s team dove into the data, they discovered that nearly 90 percent of the officers who had been flagged were false positives. “It was a huge eureka moment,” Putney says.

Identifying who was truly a problem cop was an obvious priority, but Ghani also wanted to predict who was most likely to misbehave in the future. So his team started to mine more data—any available information on the stops, searches, and arrests made by every Charlotte officer since 2000. In the end they analyzed 300 data points, trying to find which ones could best predict an officer’s chances of acting badly.

Ghani’s first set of predictions was shaky; it still incorrectly flagged about 875 officers, though it did correctly identify 157 officers who wound up facing a complaint or internal investigation within the following year—making it 30 percent more accurate than Charlotte’s previous model.

It came as no surprise that Ghani’s team eventually found that one of the best predictors of future problems was a history of past problems—like using unjustified force or getting into car accidents, for example. But the team also confirmed something many experts and officers had long suspected but could never demonstrate: Officers subjected to concentrated bouts of on-the-job stress—handling multiple domestic-violence or suicide calls, or cases involving young children in danger, for example—were much more likely to have complaints lodged against them by community members. “That’s something we’ve known anecdotally, but we’ve never seen empirical evidence before,” explains Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

Ghani’s research is already spurring changes in Charlotte. His team found that when three or more officers responded to a domestic-violence call, they were much less likely to use force than when only two officers were called to the scene. Putney says that realization has led his department to rethink how it handles emotionally charged incidents. He is eager to see what Ghani’s research says about shift rotations as well. Often, the youngest and least experienced cops get stuck on night shifts, which tend to be the most stressful and violent, and “where they can become desensitized and calloused,” he says. Putney also hopes to use Ghani’s research as a guide for traits to look for when hiring new officers. He is circumspect, though, about the ability to accurately foresee a police officer’s behavior. Some variables will always be unpredictable, he says, like when things go wrong at 3 a.m. But with 300 data points, he adds, “maybe there’s some science behind this after all.”

Ghani agrees there are limitations to his big-data approach. Even the most accurate predictions won’t eliminate bad cops. Preventing abuses may require a wider look at how officers are recruited, trained, counseled, and disciplined—as well as addressing personal and systemic biases. Without that layer of human intervention and analysis, personnel decisions based on predictive data alone could ricochet through a police department, harming morale and possibly making things worse.

“This is the first step,” Alpert says. “It may not be a panacea, but we’ve got to start thinking differently.” Eventually, Ghani says, data from dashboard and body cameras will factor into his calculations, and his system will help dispatchers quickly decide which officer is best suited to respond to a certain type of call at any given moment. He hopes most large police departments will adopt prediction models in the next five years. Most of the police officials at that White House meeting have said they’d like to work with him, and his team is negotiating with the Los Angeles County sheriff and the police chief of Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t know if this will work at every department,” he says. “But it’s going to be better than what it is now.”

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

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Hillary Clinton Is No Donald Trump

by CelestaPullen53 Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the LA Times today, Barton Swaim argues that in this year’s presidential election “we are faced with a choice between two pathologically dishonest candidates.” He runs through a few of Donald Trump’s seemingly bottomless supply of obvious lies, and then turns his attention to Hillary Clinton:

Clinton’s career offers a similarly dizzying array of bogus claims—(1) that she had known nothing about the firing of White House travel office employees in 1993, though she had orchestrated it; (2) that she deplaned in Bosnia under sniper fire; (3) that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest when she was 5; (4) that she was a fierce critic of NAFTA “from the very beginning” when in fact she worked to get it passed; (5) that she “did not email any classified material to anyone,” though of course she did, many times.

This is the sign of a pathologically dishonest candidate? Swaim rather easily found five clear and consequential lies from Trump’s campaign this year, but not a single one from Hillary’s. He had to go back more than 20 years to put together this list, and even so he couldn’t manage to find five clear examples. #3 was a trivial recounting of a family story that apparently wasn’t true. #4 is modestly misleading, but not much more. (Hillary was privately skeptical of NAFTA from the beginning, and became more public about it after she was no longer part of her husband’s administration.) #5 is not a lie at all. It’s true—unless you count a bunch of emails that were retroactively classified only years after she sent them.

So that leaves #1 and #2. I’ll give Swaim both of them. That’s two lies between 1993 and 2008—about as many as Trump tells each day before lunch. If Hillary is really pathologically dishonest, surely Swaim could have pretty easily found more examples more recently? Frankly, if Hillary really does average one lie per decade, it might very well place her among the most honest politicians on the planet.

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Hillary Clinton Is No Donald Trump

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Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Outside the White House

by DeborahESSM Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Secret Service officers shot and arrested a man who brandished a gun outside the White House on Friday afternoon, according to a statement from the agency.

“Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers gave numerous verbal commands for the subject to stop and drop the firearm,” said Secret Service spokesman David A. Iacovetti. “When the subject failed to comply with the verbal commands, he was shot once by a Secret Service agent and taken into custody.”

The shooting took place at 2 p.m. on West Executive Drive, a closed street that runs next to the White House and leads to the West Wing. Neither President Barack Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden were in the White House during the incident, and the Secret Service confirmed that no one under its protection had been harmed.

The White House confirmed after the incident that no one else in the building was harmed. “”No one within or associated with the White House was injured, and everyone in the White House is safe and accounted for,” a White House official told CNN.

The Secret Service has yet to release a name or any other information on the man who was shot. The White House lockdown that went into effect after the shooting has been lifted.

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Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Outside the White House

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Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Young Ben Rhodes

by DominicTyrell Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago the New York Times posted a long profile by David Samuels of White House communications guru Ben Rhodes. It turns out that in private Rhodes is pretty contemptuous of the foreign policy establishment, and thanks to the Times profile he’s now contemptuous in public too. He also has some harsh words for the press, and as you might expect, the press has taken this with its usual thick skin. This piece by Carlos Lozada is typical. And here’s a typical headline:

Is that a fair summary? In the Times profile, Rhodes describes how his communications shop tries to spin the news. By itself, this isn’t much of a revelation. That’s what communications people do. But was Rhodes really bragging about how easy it was to con reporters? The relevant excerpt comes after the reporter (not Rhodes) explains the “radical and qualitative” ways the news business has changed recently:

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.”

Is Rhodes displaying arrogance or smugness here? That’s not how I took it when I initially read the piece. To me it scanned as an expression of regret. Rhodes himself is never quoted as being cocky or patronizing about his ability to shape foreign affairs reporting. He’s just describing what he has to deal with, and explaining how that affects the way a modern White House press shop works. More digital, less print. More tutoring of young reporters, fewer tough questions from area experts.

Am I nuts for reading it this way? For those of you who have read the Times piece—And don’t lie! Did you really read it?—what was your takeaway? Is Rhodes arrogant and manipulative? Or unhappy with the state of journalism but realistic about how it affects the way he does his job?

UPDATE: It’s worth being very careful when you read the Times profile. You need to distinguish between what Rhodes says and how Samuels frames the quotes. Rhodes himself is fairly anodyne. In the quote above, for example, Rhodes is merely saying something that lots of reporters say too. It’s Samuels who labels this as “brutal contempt.”

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Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Young Ben Rhodes

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Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"

by LorrieNuyts Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The veteran CIA official who once provided intelligence briefings to presidential candidates—including Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004—says briefing Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, could be rather difficult.

“It’s an extraordinary year and Trump doesn’t fit any mold at all,” John McLaughlin, the former deputy CIA director who served as acting head of the agency in 2004, tells Mother Jones. “I think he’d be a hard brief.”

To McLaughlin, Trump looks like an inflexible candidate who might not take well to information that contradicts or undercuts his own positions. “As an intelligence briefer, you’d probably be telling him a fair number of things that are at odds with his stated views,” he notes. “And then you would find out how well he absorbs discordant information…Trump’s public statements don’t suggest that he’s someone who easily deals with things that strongly disagree with his view.”

Other intelligence officials have expressed similar concerns since Trump became the all-but-certain GOP standard-bearer this week. “Given that Trump’s public persona seems to reflect a lack of understanding or care about global issues, how do you arrange these presentations to learn what are the true depths of his understanding?” former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden told the Washington Post. There’s also the possibility that Trump will blurt out classified information on the campaign trail. McLaughlin says candidates—and any aides they may want to bring into intelligence briefings—aren’t required to obtain security clearance to participate in the briefings. Lengthy and detailed background checks are the norm for government officials granted access to classified material.

The White House referred questions on the intelligence briefing process to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which carries out the briefings. That office has said it won’t provide further details until after the nominating conventions in July. Candidates do not receive intelligence briefings until they are officially nominated.

The White House has ultimate say over what information goes into the briefings, and McLaughlin says President Barack Obama could even decline to offer briefings to the candidates. But he believes that would be unlikely. His hunch is that in the case of Trump, the White House would take extra steps to stress to Trump and his aides the sensitive nature of the information and the need to protect it. “But who knows?” McLaughlin adds. “We don’t know who Trump is.”

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Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"

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Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

by DeniceQBJxtzjf Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the New York Times Magazine this week, David Samuels has a long profile of Ben Rhodes, the chief messaging guru for foreign affairs in the White House. Generally speaking, Rhodes seems like my kind of guy, but what’s most interesting about the profile isn’t really Rhodes himself, but his take on modern journalism. For example:

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….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.”

Or this on how to spin the news:

Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people….And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

….In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Or this:

Rhodes developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

….Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.

The Blob “catching on” means that a lot of members of the foreign policy establishment have decided that maybe they don’t like Obama so much after all. He’s just too unwilling to send in the military when there’s a problem somewhere. At least, that seems like their big complaint to me.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read—not so much for what it says about Rhodes or Obama, but for what it says about the news business circa 2016. In a way, nothing has changed: presidents always try to shape the news, and they use whatever tools are at hand in their particular era. But in another way, everything has changed. It’s not just the tools that have changed this time, it’s the entire press corps.

Source article – 

Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

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