This week’s White House report card finds grader Jed Babbin coming down hard on the administration and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes who bragged in the New York Times about spinning tales to sell the controversial Iran nuclear deal.
Jed Babbin
It seemed like “Celebrity Jeopardy” week in Washington, the celebrity being Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and the jeopardy resulting from the death of the last shred of the Obama administration’s credibility. Rhodes, a fiction novelist by training, found considerable use for his only skill in spinning lies about Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran.
Ben Rhodes, the aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign-policy guru https://t.co/sDyYUmKfbT pic.twitter.com/M1hxKmF7zB
— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) May 9, 2016
He described them in an interview in the New York Times Magazine, which portrayed him as second only to the president in influence on foreign policy. His boasts to the NYT confirm the most serious criticisms that have been levied against the deal from the outset. They show that President Obama and his team weren’t up front about deal which assures that Iran will have nuclear weapons within the time period of the agreement.
How the foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes sold the Iran deal: “We created an echo chamber” https://t.co/xFaiuSyhKM pic.twitter.com/AxR3Bh7Rmk
— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) May 6, 2016
We don’t know what the side deals provide (not even the Senate does), but one evidently allows Iran to inspect some of its own nuclear facilities, as it is now doing, and — to no one’s surprise — reporting that everything is just tickety-boo there.
Grade F
Jed Babbin is an Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in administration of former President George H.W. Bush.
Follow him @jedbabbin
Our regular co-grader, pollster John Zogby, was traveling this week.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
