President Trump is known to lie, even when it does not matter. To fact-check him is easy.
But perhaps feeling that the world’s irony content was too low, MSNBC, for some reason, this week called on Ben Rhodes, the former Obama White House staffer quite literally famous for lying to journalists, as the man to apply the fact-check.
Rhodes is also known for his astonishingly poor foreign policy judgment. In other words, MSNBC hosted the Democratic mirror-image of Trump to “fact-check” Trump.
The president claimed Wednesday that captured members of the Islamic State were “under very, very strict lock and key,” and that only a “small number” had escaped following the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria.
“They’ve been largely recaptured,” said Trump.
Following the president’s address, NBC News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, inexplicably turned to Rhodes for a “fact-check.”
It is “obvious” that many ISIS prisoners have escaped, the former Deputy National Security Advisor told Mitchell, arguing further that one must look at the “broader context” of how terrorist groups come to power.
“Turkey has not had an interest in fighting ISIS,” Rhodes said. “In fact, the situation that we faced in 2014 when this all began is that Turkey was actually permitting the free flow of people across that border into Syria to fight with ISIS. So it was the Kurds, who put their lives on the line, 11,000 Kurds lost in that fight against ISIS, with U.S. air support and the support of U.S. special forces.”
Conspicuously absent from this conversation with Mitchell was any mention of the Obama-era “red line,” in which America’s 44th president pledged to take military action if Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, then failed to make good on that pledge when the Syrian strongman did exactly that. This contributed in a major way to dragging out Syria’s brutal civil war and furthering the chaos in that region — chaos that Rhodes comments on freely without any mention of his and his former employer’s role in it.
Also, we cannot have a discussion of Rhodes without mentioning the fact that he once bragged — he bragged! — to the New York Times magazine in 2016 that he manipulated reporters and pundits regularly to advance the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda.
David Samuels’ profile of Rhodes’ reads:
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
This is the man MSNBC turned to this week to “fact-check” the president on Syria.
So, do they turn to him again because they enjoy being lied to?
This is reminiscent of CNN extending contributor contracts to known liars from the intelligence community, including disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe and disgraced former NSA Director James Clapper. Why does cable news continue to elevate sources who cannot be trusted? There are surely knowledgeable experts who are not also liars whom you can put on camera to speak to the political issues of the day.
Aren’t there?
