Tea Party problem: too many choices

The New Neo Posted on by

What happened in North Carolina last night? I think that blogger CAC at Ace’s hits the nail on the head in this post, and points out a problem that GOP conservatives had better figure out a solution to or they’ll be griping even more about the vast-RINO-conspiracy against them:

I’ve seen a lot of hemming and hawing about how the villainous Karl Rove and his band of toads flooded the zone and dragged “their guy” Tillis across the finish line in yesterday’s North Carolina primary. Thom Tillis was the establishment’s pick, and he won- just under 46% per the last county updates I’ve seen. However, the establishment is what it is, and how it has enjoyed wins in important primaries, both Senatorial and Presidential, isn’t thanks to their spending or some deal in a smoke-filled room. It is far simpler than that.

How can I say this? Because over 54% of Republican primary voters did not vote for Tillis. Had these other voters consolidated behind a single candidate, as the establishment always does even if they have to switch gears to do so (see the maneuvering to push Christie out and test Bush), Brannon or Harris would be the one facing Senator Hagan.

Conservatives jump from candidate to candidate in a lot of these races, and the more who throw their hat into the ring, the further it dilutes their voice in the primary.

CAC calls it the Baskin-Robbins problem (read the whole thing to find out why). But whatever you want to call it, it consists of the fact that the Tea Party, a group of individualists, must somehow coalesce behind the best conservative candidate in each race if it is going to both maximize its power and choose an individual who actually has a chance of winning in the general.

And that latter point is the point, which is a point that conservatives sometimes lose sight of in their need to find someone that agrees with them on all measures. But I do not share their favored “stab-in-the-back” theories to explain their losses. Yes, there are some powerful RINO Republicans who are working against Tea Party interests. But when I look at the actual Tea Party candidates and the actual races they actually lose and how and why, there’s no need to invoke some nefarious conspiracy. The candidates they field had better be smart, appealing, and not so numerous that they split the conservative vote. That’s not rocket science to figure out, although it’s not all that easy to accomplish.

So stop whining about what victims you are and start figuring out how to win.

One more thing: Democratic candidates have figured all of this out, and their new tack (which they attempted in their campaign against Tillis, who they—rightly, I believe—saw as their most dangerous opposition) is to fund ads aimed at convincing conservatives that the strongest GOP candidate is too moderate and is really a RINO. It didn’t work effectively enough against Tillis last night, but it’s worked before in other races and has led directly to Democratic victories. Divide and conquer.

You had me at hello

The New Neo Posted on by

I remember reading decades ago about how quickly we judge people when we first meet them. Yes or no, stay or move on?

This 1986 book said the judgments all happen within four minutes, but my impression is that it’s usually much much sooner than that. We are instantaneously and constantly evaluating almost countless bits of information being received, not just about superficial looks (although there’s that, too) but about body language (gesture, posture, movement, tension), expression, scent, intelligence, humor, health, and much more.

I’ve always been one to have strong and quick reactions to people (both pro and con), so strong and so quick it can be almost dizzying. For me, one puzzling aspect has been that my impressions have been nearly as strong even when only meeting someone for the first time over the phone. And those first impressions have almost never (or maybe even never ever) been wrong, on the occasions when I’ve had a chance to check them out in person later.

I first noticed this two decades ago, when I was in graduate school. I worked in a clinic where the staff fielded the initial phone calls from clients and did a short intake, then passed the clients on to the therapist, who had to make a contact call. At the point of making that first call I already knew a bit about the clients—most often a couple or family—but really not all that much. I’d have in front of me a sheet of paper with the names in the family, their ages, and a sentence or two about the presenting problem as the family member who had made the initial agency contact defined it.

But as soon as the person answered the phone and said “hello” I would get a feeling so powerful that it couldn’t be denied. I either knew it would be relatively easy to work with this person or family, or felt an ominous “oh-oh” that would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, telling me that something was very, very wrong and I was in for a rough ride. These impressions always panned out when I worked with people.

Now, you could say it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I don’t think so. It’s a bit like another thing I’ve noticed, which is that when I’ve gotten massages, I can tell the moment the person first touches me whether this will be a good massage or a bad one. And that perception is independent of whether I’ve liked them or not during those first four minutes of meeting face to face. Sometimes I like them very much, but when the first touch happens I think “Oh no, that won’t do.” Sometimes I’m not all that keen on them, but it’s clear the moment the massage starts that this is going to work out very well. In other words, there seems to be no correlation.

Which brings us to this article:

Remember that famous line in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise, “You had me at ‘hello’ “? Well it turns out there is some scientific evidence to back this up. People use voices to instantly judge people, researchers say.

Of course.

McAleer recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word “hello.” He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth.

What he found was that the participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy, “the sort of guy you’d want to avoid,” McAleer says. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices.

What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. “Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted.”

So, you gals—and guys, as you’ll see from this video—who constantly uptalk, beware!

My obligatory Monica Lewinsky post

The New Neo Posted on by

Why Monica, why now?:

After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past””and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)”

With a curiously old-fashioned air (“parapet”), Monica comes out of her self-imposed hiding/silence and tells her side of the story. Since it’s behind a paywall I haven’t read it. But I’ve read summaries and excerpts, and it doesn’t sound as though it breaks any new ground.

Of course, everyone’s real angle on the story is: is it good or bad for Hillary? I think it’s so early in game that it’s not especially one or the other—her article will blow over (as it were) by the time it might matter. Lewinksy’s getting it over with now because it’s almost inevitable she’ll be pursued by the press if Hillary runs. But in general, the Lewinsky episode itself is a net negative for the Clintons, because—although for some, it engenders sympathy for Hillary—it reminds America of Bill’s sordidness.

Why Obama can’t seem to catch a break

The New Neo Posted on by

No, this article giving six reasons for the above phenomenon did not appear in the Onion.

My favorites are numbers three, four, and six: Obama’s been stymied by the vast and controlling “conservative media complex”; he’s had too much “policy success”; he’s been too unwilling “to promote and sell his policies.”

You can’t make this stuff up. But apparently Julian Zelizer, Princeton professor and the article’s author, can.

It’s that last point, number six, that interests me the most. I’ve been hearing it from pundits on the left almost since Obama became president, despite the fact that he’s been selling his policies assiduously from the beginning, “communicating” up a storm.

What’s behind argument six? In some cases it’s just propaganda, but in others (and my guess is that Zelizer may fall into this camp) the writer really believes it. If a person accepts as a self-evident truth the fact that Obama is a brilliant man and a great communicator and persuader, and that his cause is just, then his failure to persuade the American people can only have one possible explanation, which is that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to do so.

Nigerian jihadist terrorist group kidnapped hundreds of young girls and plans to sell them

The New Neo Posted on by

One would think that this would be enormous news, and should have been from the moment the girls were kidnapped:

Fears for the fate of more than 200 Nigerian girls [kidnapped from school on April 14, almost 3 weeks ago] turned even more nightmarish Monday when the leader of the Islamist militant [sic: terrorist] group that kidnapped them announced plans to sell them.

“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” a man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video first obtained by Agence France-Presse.

“There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women,” he continued, according to a CNN translation from the local Hausa language.

Boko Haram is a terrorist group receiving training from al Qaeda affiliates, according to U.S. officials. Its name means “Western education is sin.” In his nearly hourlong, rambling video, Shekau repeatedly called for Western education to end.

“Girls, you should go and get married,” he said.

War on women, anyone? And this sort of thing has been going on for quite some time; for example, I wrote about Boko Haram at some length in this post from nearly a year ago. The group is composed of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists who are especially against the education of women, although education of the secular variety for any child or young person in Nigeria is their target as well, and they will murder or sell into sexual slavery (let’s not mince words here) anyone they can get their hands on, all in the name of their religion. Special targets are often Christians, but Muslims are hardly except from their violence.

More here:

Gunmen abducted the girls from their dormitories at the Government Girls Secondary school in Chibok. One girl told the New Yorker that militants dressed in Nigerian military uniforms came into their dorms and told the girls they were being taken to a safe space.

From the start there’s been little doubt who did it and what their intention is. After all, Boko Haram’s goal is to wipe secular education out in Nigeria, both for Christians and for Muslims, and to establish “a ‘pure’ Islamic state ruled by sharia law.” To this end the group has committed thousands of murders, as well as many kidnappings and assassinations.

With the help of al Qaeda (which tends to think big), Boko Haram has stepped up the scale of its terrorism in recent years. The large number of victims involved in this recent kidnapping is probably the only reason it’s getting international press in the first place. That’s how common Boko Haram’s predations have become.

The Times struggles to keep on propagandizing in the face of the harsh realities of Obama’s foreign policy

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Times has a dilemma. It cannot help but notice that the expected and predicted fruits of Obama’s foreign policy (or of his mere presence in the White House) seem to be rotting on the ground. Even more importantly, the Times figures that its readers are noticing too. The situation is just too fetid to successfully deny any more, and if the newspaper continues to do so, those of its regular readers who retain some integrity might consider the paper to be the completely owned propaganda organ that it is, and take offense.

So, what to do? The answer is to write editorials like this one from yesterday, a delicate balancing act that acknowledges just enough reality to sound credible to those readers but not enough to really risk any of their strongly-held beliefs that Obama is pretty decent and has America’s best interests at heart. It’s a bit tricky to successfully pull off, but the Times proves it’s up to the task in an effort that is a tour de force of the genre.

For every acknowledgement of the mess the Obama administration has caused, there’s a subsequent apologia absolving him fully or at least considerably softening the blow. And the editors don’t forget to make sure they say that, however bad it is, Bush was worse. So the editorial is a series of steps forward and steps back, written so smoothly that most readers are probably unaware of how the sashaying is done.

From the first paragraph–first, the bad news:

…President Obama is being pummeled at home and abroad for his international leadership. The world sometimes seems as if it is flying apart, with Mr. Obama unable to fix it.

Seems that way rather than is that way, so even that accusation is tempered at the start. Then the semi-exoneration:

Through a combination of a few significant missteps, circumstances beyond his control, unreasonable expectations and his maddeningly bland demeanor, Mr. Obama has opened himself to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will.

Let’s pause for a moment to admire the editors’ handiwork. You think they don’t know how to write? Well, think again. I offer that last sentence as one of the finest examples of exquisitely nunanced shilly-shallying I’ve ever read. The supposed dose of reality comes with the recognition that Obama has committed “significant missteps,” although that’s tempered by the unsupported notion that they are “few” in number. Well, everybody makes mistakes, don’t they? The rest of the problem for Obama is, according to the Times, a combination of just plain bad luck (unnamed “circumstances beyond his control”); the fault of others noticing his own wonderfulness (“unreasonable expectations”—presumably expectations for Obama and not by Obama); his calm character, heretofore considered a good thing, but which the Times admits can be “maddening.” All of this has “opened” Obama “to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will.” The Times is being especially tricky in that last phrase, because the editors are not really saying that Obama is in fact failing to articulate this blueprint or to bend those leaders, just that he has acted in a way that invites criticism.

That’s paragraph one. Paragraph two goes like this:

It is paradoxical that, in key respects, Mr. Obama is precisely the kind of foreign policy president most Americans and their allies overseas wanted. He rejected the shoot-first tendencies of George W. Bush, who pretended to have all the answers, bungled two wars and asserted an in-your-face American exceptionalism that included bullying allies. We know where that got us.

Shorter version: Obama is exactly what we all yearned for after that horrible Bush. And wasn’t Bush awful?

The next paragraph is devoted to the idea that Obama’s critics have been too harsh on him and have ignored his very real accomplishments. That those accomplishments are listed as “salvaging” the economy (someone in the comments section wrote that perhaps the eds meant “savaging” instead) and producing “the first possibility of a deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons” gives you an indication of the quality of the Times’ claims.

The next paragraph, number four, tries to describe what Obama’s critics think is wrong with him: maybe, they say “he lacks a passion for foreign policy,” “has no inspiring ideological prism, or “is too resigned” to obstacles to American power. But these are tepid critiques that don’t even begin to deal with what many of us on the right have said from the early days of Obama’s first term: that he does have an ideological prism, and that it is leftism and geared to harming our allies and helping our enemies, and that he’s not merely “resigned” to a loss of American power but is instead actively engineering that loss.

In the next paragraph, the fifth, the Times comes closest to articulating a real criticism of Obama—and perhaps its own actual views as well—which is that the president has been “unfocused, weak, and passive.” The editors refuse to consider—and probably would never say if they did realize—the possibility that his passivity on the world stage is conscious, purposeful, and strategic.

Why do I keep harping on the Times, when we all know this is the way they roll? I still think it’s edifying to learn how they do it. Also, I don’t know about you, but my liberal friends and family still respect the Times and are hugely informed by it. The Times is also tremendously influential in setting the tone and the approach for other periodicals as well as pundits on the left. We may mock it, but its propaganda still shapes our world—not the world of reality, but the world of public opinion, which then influences reality.

But Dude, if you think about it…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Tommy Vietor was only re-stating the oft-repeated message of the Obama administration about the Benghazi emails.

I yield to none in my contempt for Vietor and in my rage that someone so callow and disrespectful was allowed anywhere near the American presidency. But his actual message—that the right is focusing on behavior both trivial and past the statute of limitations when it criticizes the White House’s lies and politically manipulative messaging to the American people on Benghazi—is actually more pernicious than his lack of style. What’s more, although other Democrats and White House spokespeople haven’t yet gone so far as to say “Dude” when they talk about it, their message is his message and his message is their message. It’s a regular Vulcan mind-meld.

That message is a bigger outrage than “Dude,” or the smirk on Vietor’s face. Theirs is an implicit smirk, a thumbing of the nose, a big middle finger to the American people and to the four men killed that evening in Benghazi.

Transparency? Accountability? That’s for suckers, not for Obama and his people.

[ADDENDUM: Case in point, just from today.]

Why dance films and videos don’t really work all that well

The New Neo Posted on by

Whenever I write about dance, I’m handicapped by the fact that all I can offer is a video and some words, and perhaps a few still photos.

That’s better than nothing. But it doesn’t even begin to compare with seeing a dance performance in person. On a flat screen you cannot properly appreciate depth and height, closeness and distance, and the living breathing force of the person moving in space right before your very eyes.

Dance is partly illusion—of floating, soaring, and flying; of indefatigability and ease while performing almost impossible feats (sometimes consisting of a variation after which the dancer pukes in the wings), of effortless beauty and eternal love (sometimes between two dancers who are at loggerheads).

Here’s a particularly good example of what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the following dance in person at least three or four times, and each time it has been extraordinary. The first time I ever saw “Caught” (when it was new, in the early 80s) I decided the illusion was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, I’ve ever seen in the theater—arresting, startling, and magical.

But the video gives you almost no sense of what I might be talking about (the real action only gets started around minute 2:15; I strongly suggest you watch it in full screen mode). To appreciate the illusion, the viewer must be aware of three dimensions, including and especially the location of the stage floor vis a vis the leaping strobe-lit dancer, and depth and height perception and scale. In the real thing, live, the dancer looks for all the world as though he is either flying or walking on the air:

Alas, David Parsons no longer performs the piece. But his company does, and I highly recommend going to see them if you get the chance, in no small part because it’s one of the few modern dance companies that feature humor as well. I wish I could find a video of Parson’s “Sleep Study,” one of my favorite examples of that genre. But I can’t, so here’s a still—which gives you only the very roughest idea of what I might be talking about:

sleepstudy

[ADDENDUM: I’ve just learned that “Caught” was Parsons’ very first work (an old video of part of it can be found here). Here’s Parsons talking about having choreographed “Caught” at the very outset of his career:

And here’s a nice clip of excerpts from the Parsons Dance Company’s repertoire, for those who want to see more. It doesn’t give you much idea of Parson’s formidable comedic talents, but it does give you a notion of his choreographic dynamism, and it ends with a couple more seconds of “Caught” that give the best example on video I’ve yet seen of the experience of seeing it in person:

And a short one of another dancer doing “Caught”:

That should whet your appetite.]

Before you reach happily for the butter and the steak…

The New Neo Posted on by

…let me just say that this article is as bad or worse than the science it purports to debunk.

I could write either a book on this topic or a short post. Since it’s Saturday, you get the short post. But here are my main points in response to Nina Teicholz’s case against the anti-animal-fat crowd:

(1) It is almost impossible to design a really good and definitive study of diets and what they do and don’t do, healthwise. There are too many variables impossible or difficult to control for, and people’s reports are unreliable as well.

(2) So you can find a study or studies illustrating just about anything you want, and others can find fault with those studies and they’d be right.

(3) You can’t pick and choose just a few; you have to look at the entire spectrum of studies on a topic (and that takes not just a book, but a very very long book, and much of it will be garbage in/garbage out anyway).

(4) It’s well-known even in the medical world, and many books have been written on the subject, that a simple cholesterol/heart disease connection is suspect, especially for women and the elderly.

(5) It’s not just animal fat vs. low animal fat, it’s what sort of diet replaces the animal fat if you reduce it: what type of new fat, what type of carbohydrate, what quantities, what else you’re eating, what else you’re doing, etc.

(6) Different ethnic populations may have different propensities to have trouble with different foods.

(7) There are mitigating factors: for example, a lot of red meat could be counteracted by a lot of red wine in some diets.

(8) Heart disease is hardly the only thing that gets us. Just to take one example, it’s possible that animal fat isn’t so much implicated in heart disease but raises cancer risk significantly.

In summary, how about the old moderation approach?

Orwell, Animal Farm, and socialism’s inherent contradictions

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday commenter “Nick” wrote this on the thread about Krystal Ball’s Animal Farm summary:

OK, OK, I hate to be this guy, but Orwell would have been fine with Ball’s reading. Orwell was a socialist. His problem with the pigs was that they became no different from the neighboring farmers; his problem with Soviet Marxism was that it acted just like capitalism

Orwell self-identified as a socialist, and “Nick” makes a thought-provoking point, but I disagree with it. Animal Farm isn’t about Orwell’s own complicated and contradictory political stance. It’s a parable that was meant to illustrate some of the inherent evils of Communism. Yes, economic exploitation by those in power towards the workers (all in the name of a false “equality”) was part of it. But the focus was on totalitarianism, lack of liberty, and statist control—problems he located in the left, not capitalism.

That said, it is also true that Orwell was very much against income inequality. In fact, that’s the main reason he identified as a socialist. His socialism was a strange beast, however, and he himself recognized the inherent contradictions and difficulties of adherence to it:

As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”

Orwell was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world.

Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinism/Communism, and although capitalism as an exploitative system plays a role at the beginning of the book, by the end the astute reader sees Communism as at least as bad or even worse. Orwell was also aware of the strong possibility that liberty and socialism of any sort (not just Communist Stalinism) could not be reconciled, as the above quotes from him indicate. It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.

More:

Socialists have also raised some interesting questions about what Orwell seems to be saying about Lenin and the rise of Stalinism. In fact, Orwell has suggested elsewhere that Trotsky and Lenin are partly responsible for the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and that Bolshevism itself contained elements of authoritarianism. Molyneux, the British socialist, has written a compelling article with a very close reading of the plot and characters of Animal Farm, and concludes that Orwell equates Lenin with Stalin (morphed into the single Napoleon character). Molyneux argues that Orwell gives no way to understand the reasons for the revolution’s failure except human nature (as opposed to insufficient material conditions). All this leaves the book with the reactionary message at the heart of it”“that all revolutions fail.

…Even in his best political writing, and his sharp exposés of aspects of capitalism, Orwell was never sure whether a real alternative was possible. Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his most famous books undoubtedly reflect these frustrations and despair. Writing as an isolated intellectual removed from day-to-day struggle, (with the notable exception of his participation in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell never regained the hope for workers’ power he experienced while in Spain.

And that’s coming from a pro-socialist, writing in a socialist periodical.

Obama’s foreign policy advisors: the parade of the puerile Best and Brightest

The New Neo Posted on by

First we have Ben Rhodes, fiction writer morphed into Obama’s deputy National Security Advisor while barely in his mid-thirties, with nary a bit of foreign policy experience under his belt except what he learned on the job. But he has a way with words, and that’s what we want, don’t we?

Next meet Tommy Vietor, the 33-year-old former press van driver and Tweeter extraordinaire who became spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama. He newly distinguished himself the other day for—well, I’ll let him tell it himself:

I don’t usually quote YouTube video comments, because they’re not known for their high level of discourse. But looking at some of them right now, they seem pretty spot on:

This condescending little prick works for us, the people of the United States.

Not being completely morally bankrupt, I think I’d remember the events surrounding everything I did in conjunction with the deaths of 4 human beings. There is no moral compass in this Administration. We shouldn’t think for a moment that we who are in opposition to this Administration can expect an ounce of sympathy and human decency from this bunch if and when the bottom falls out of this country. If this clown is an example of the ‘quality’ of human being this Administration seeks to represent them, we are all in trouble. Zero integrity. Zero empathy. Zero humanity. Zero respect. Zero conscience. Zero tolerance. Zero spiritual awareness. Zero moral values. Zero appreciation for the truth. Zero compassion. Shall I go on, Dude?

Yeah dude who remembers things from two years ago anyway?

How old were you two years ago? That’s like, ancient history man.

Say what you want about this kid but, you really should pay very close attention to him. He is a portrait of what this nation has become and the character of its future leadership.

Another comment at YouTube refers to a “White House full of frat boys.” Bingo. I would amend that to “frat boys with power.”

The Vieter interview encapsulates and personifies the fundamental unseriousness of so much of the crew surrounding Obama and hand-picked by the President. They are play-acting at adulthood and responsibility, with a vast storehouse of arrogant snark underneath (I could say the same thing about Obama, except I think he’s a lot more serious—a lot). Is there any behavior that would disgrace these people, other than a clandestine tape showing them using a racist or homophobic epithet? Or have they lost that notion along with the idea of dignity?

[ADDENDUM: In a post about Ben Rhodes from about a year ago, I wrote:

Obama prefers to be surrounded by politically astute sycophants who are in way over their heads and don’t realize it. That way he is less likely to be threatened or challenged.

So it occurs to me that maybe the simplest way to describe what happened in Benghazi is that, from start to finish, nearly everyone in charge and everyone who was a close and trusted advisor to those in charge was a political operative. Everyone. This of course includes Obama and Hillary Clinton, and all the supposed national security advisors such as Rhodes.

So they are a bunch of rank amateurs who literally have no idea what they were doing except in the political sense. And then when things went bad, they lied about it””using their words to try to get out of a jam, with the help of their friends in the MSM. It’s worked for them in the past, and might well work again.

But perhaps that was a little too kind.]