Speechwriters as experts: it’s all about the words

The New Neo Posted on by

Several people have mentioned Ben Rhodes in connection with the Benghazi debacle (just Google “Ben Rhodes Benghazi” and you’ll find plenty of the speculation). It’s not at all clear how much responsibility Rhodes had for the decisions during the Benghazi attack and the spin afterward. But what is clear is that Rhodes is one of Obama’s many advisors who lack anything remotely connected with expertise, except in the art of politics and speechwriting. Despite this, for Obama Rhodes doesn’t just write about foreign policy, he helps to make it.

Rhodes’ resume is singularly unimpressive, except after he was tapped by Obama to write for him and then to somehow be a foreign policy “expert.” Rhodes is hardly unique in the Obama administration for having this sort of background. The president seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something.

Other presidents have been inexperienced, but they have made efforts to choose experienced and knowledgeable people to make up for their own shortcomings. Obama does not believe he has any shortcomings, and so he does the opposite. For the most part, his advisors tend to have several characteristics in common besides their lack of substantive knowledge about their new fields: (1) they are good with words; (2) they are young; (3) they are focused on politics; (4) they revere Obama.

I’ve written before about this phenomenon, but we keep being reminded of it, and so it bears repeating: 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.

I think it’s just as simple as that.

[NOTE: More about Ben Rhodes here [written in 2010]:

Who is Ben Rhodes and what qualifies him to be the Deputy National Security Adviser?

He was Barack Obama’s speechwriter (albeit, on foreign policy topics) during the campaign. He also played a role in the Cairo speech that presented a highly fictionalized history of both Islam (praised it for accomplishments that were not Islam’s) and Israel (a legacy of the Holocaust guilt).

Maybe he has a certain talent for fiction. After all, it was only a few years ago that “he was an aspiring fiction writer working on a novel called “The Oasis of Love” about a megachurch in Houston, a dog track and a failed romance.

Rhodes has enjoyed a rapid rise — because why?

Granted he is quite the wordsmith. That must qualify him for one of the top jobs involving our national security. It must have been a symbiotic relationship — a talented speechwriter with a talented speech reader.

Does Rhodes have any educational experience or military experience or, for that matter, international experience? No… on all three counts.

His bio, such as it is:

Rhodes had just earned a master’s degree in fiction writing from New York University when he was offered a job as a writer for Hamilton in 2002. A Manhattan native, Rhodes went on to write the Iraq Study Group Report and help draft policy recommendations for the 9/11 Commission, which Hamilton co-chaired.

Rhodes keeps in regular contact with Hamilton, who said Obama has thanked him “for making Ben available.”

Rhodes said Hamilton still reviews Obama’s major foreign policy addresses.

“We run most of the big foreign policy speeches by him,” he said. “Just kind of like, ”˜What do you think of this?'”

So far Obama’s Iraq speech has been the most meaningful for Rhodes. Aides credit him with the part where Obama spoke directly to the Iraqi people. Rhodes is also behind Obama’s telling the story of two Marines who died trying to stop a suicide bomber from entering an American military compound in Iraq.

During “the download” Obama had told Rhodes he wanted to end on the troops.

“I literally just spent a lot of time Googling,” Rhodes said.

From fiction writing (displayed so well in the Cairo speech and the Iraq Study Group) to Deputy National Security Adviser-and he is all of 32 years old. And he is the Deputy national Security Adviser with grave responsibilities for our security.]

[ADDENDUM: Stuart Schneiderman has more.]

More on the Cleveland kidnappings: psychics

The New Neo Posted on by

We still don’t know too many of the details about yesterday’s remarkable case in which three kidnapped girls, long thought dead, returned. But one thing I do know is that the timing of their escape is excellent—Mother’s Day is coming!

But unfortunately for one of them, Amanda Berry and her family, her mother didn’t live to see this day. Berry’s mother Louwana Miller died in 2006 at the age of 44 from complications of pancreatitis. Well-known TV psychic Sylvia Browne had told her back in 2004 that Amanda was dead, and her mother said that after that she “lost it” (meaning, lost hope that her daughter was alive).

But don’t sit on a hot stove waiting for an apology from Browne. And I bet her admirers will be making excuses for her. Too bad Browne couldn’t have done something useful, like key into where Berry and the others really were so that they might have been found earlier.

It’s not the first time for Browne, either:

Browne is a particularly loathsome example of the genre, IMHO. If you go to YouTube and do a search for her name, you’ll find any number of stupid screw-ups of hers. Why is this woman still appearing on TV and raking in the money? Human beings are both vulnerable and gullible, that’s why—but Browne doesn’t even have a decent bedside manner, so it’s hard to figure out on what her popularity might be based. I hope that this incident with Berry will make some sort of a dent in the number of people who will be Browne’s victims in the future.

[NOTE: More about cold readings and how they work here, with many links.]

[ADDENDUM: More here.]

Return of the lost

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems to be the week for the return of the disappeared, presumed dead.

First it was Brenda Heist, whose disappearance was voluntary; she ran away and stayed away till now. Now comes the story of three Cleveland girls, ages 16 (almost 17), 14, and 20 when abducted in 2003, 2004, and 2001, who have now been liberated. The story’s details are unclear, but they appear to have been held prisoner by their kidnapper a la Jaycee Dugard or Elizabeth Smart.

The guy on this video is quite the character. But he’s a hero nevertheless:

A 52-year old man named Ariel Castro has been arrested.

More here.

Yes.

The New Neo Posted on by

This is exactly and precisely how I’ve come to feel.

And remember, we’re not talking about the need to filter and sift through interpretations or prognostications by the MSM. We’re talking about their reporting of supposedly simple and straighforward facts.

Hardly.

Benghazi: why now?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Benghazi story seems to be heating up, eight months after the fact. Previews of the whistleblowers’ testimony (see also this) ought to be profoundly disturbing to the Obama administration and the Clinton camp, who are likely to counter by presenting dissenting witnesses who will deny everything but who may not be able to keep their fingers in the dike as firmly as before.

There have been many fascinating things about the Benghazi incident. The terrible story itself, and the abysmal and seemingly deliberate failure of the administration to provide enough security to protect. The initial coverup. The coverup of the coverup. The coverup of the coverup of the coverup. The eager cooperation of the MSM in the coverup. The indifference of a huge swath of the American public. The left’s talking points in the MSM and the blogosphere. The Candy Crowley incident, which seemed to effectively quash Mitt Romney’s attempt to bring it to attention during the debates. The Hillary Clinton story, and the ironic fact that it is Hillary Clinton who is involved, she of the 3 A.M. phone call anti-Obama advertisement back in 2008.

And now the whistleblowers have come to the forefront. Which brings us to the question that’s been puzzling me, and to which I may or may not get an answer as time goes by: why has it taken so long, and why is it coming out at this point? I have a better hunch about the first part of the question; after all, the whistleblowers say they were threatened and intimidated and their input was suppressed by the Accountability Review Board that investigated the Benghazi attacks for the State Department (an investigative review which is itself now under investigation, by the way). So I understand why it took so long. But if so, why are they finally able to speak now? What has changed?

It may merely be a demonstration of the fact that the wheels of justice (and congressional committees, which are not necessarily the same thing, alas) grind slow, and that it takes a long time for things to move. Or it may be that—well, I’m not sure exactly what. Has some pressure been removed? Has dissatisfaction with the Obama administration been building among those who have long defended it and done its bidding? And are some of those people Obama’s protectors in the MSM and/or in Congress? Is it the State Department that’s getting angrier, and if so why now? Or is it Hillary they’re out to get, now that she’s no longer their boss?

I honestly don’t know, and I doubt you do either, although theories will probably abound. And yes, I know this is probably not the most important part of the story, but I actually think it’s very important nonetheless, and that’s because any government incident or outrage or bungling or treachery—be it Benghazi or anything else—can only matter in the long run if it sees the light of day. And the only way that can happen is if the people involved are allowed to tell what they know, and if that news filters out to those with the power to do something about it and to the American public itself.

There was little question in my mind from early on that this story was being aggressively shaped to reflect as well as possible on Obama (and Clinton), and to assure that he would not be impeded in his all-important quest for re-election. That mission has most definitely been accomplished. But if all of this had come out back in September or October, would it have changed the outcome? I’m not at all sure, but what I am sure about is that the MSM would have done everything it could to minimize and suppress it (as they did do to the more limited information that did manage to come out prior to the election).

And how much will it end up mattering now that more negative information about the administration’s role is emerging? That’s another question I keep asking. There are those who have long been predicting that Benghazi would come back to bite Obama, hard, but I haven’t been one of them. I don’t have much faith that the left’s counter-efforts to suppress and minimize and invalidate won’t succeed, or that the public hasn’t become too jaded and/or uninvolved and/or amoral and/or cognitively-challenged to care about these matters. As I wrote back on December 1, 2012:

The American people do not seem to be “concerned,” either, not at all…[F]ew people except us blogophiles on the right are listening, and Carney and Obama have learned that simply thumbing their noses at the American people is an excellent way to get the people to shrug.

I discovered this myself a few days after the election, when I had dinner with an old friend who is an intelligent, moderate, non-leftist Democrat with some conservative tendencies. This friend just didn’t care about Benghazi or the administration’s handling of it, didn’t know the details and was cynically dismissive of the topic because “all politicians lie.”

Well, they surely do””but not this brazenly, because most politicians at least have the fear of being called to account by the media and then the American people. I thought Mitt Romney should have pressed this much more in the third debate, but I also understood why he did not: it probably would have been perceived as beating a dead horse.

…[W]ill most members of the press ever get tired of prostituting themselves in the service of Obama? Is there anything about Benghazi that will finally get to them…?

So far I think the answer is a resounding “no,” but I would be exceedingly happy to be proven wrong.

I wouldn’t change a word even now, five months later.

My generation: hatin’ on the boomers

The New Neo Posted on by

[Bumped up.]

I couldn’t help but notice the amount of boomer-directed venom expressed in the comments section of yesterday’s thread.

I’ve noticed it many times before. Actually, I’ve noticed it almost every time I write about—well, about my generation. And here I think we need a musical interlude:

Note, of course, the verse:

People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

I’ve never been a big Who fan, but that’s the lyric that popped into my head yesterday when writing about the boomers and their increased suicide rate. Is some of the cause almost as simple as this (understanding, of course, that suicide is never the least bit simple): that some boomers want to die before they get really old? It’s late and getting later. No generation before the boomers (although several after them) has ever focused so obsessively on youth, and getting old is no joke.

But right now I’m going to talk ’bout the “people try to put us down” part. Those of you who hate boomers (and wish them dead, apparently, if you mean what you say) may or may not have realized that not only am I a bona fide boomer, but that boomers are now (and always have been) a somewhat conservative bunch, at least by the standards of today.

For example, who failed to vote for Barack Obama either in 2008 or 2012? Why, boomers, that’s who:

Romney won “Middle-aged voters” (45-59) by 5 points (52% to 47%). These were 29% of voters.
Romney won “Older voters” (60+) by 9 points (54% to 45%). These were 25% of voters.

When boomers die off, the voting public will be far more overwhelmingly liberal than it is now—unless, of course, other generations turn more and more conservative as they age, which is certainly possible. But if you look at voting patterns over time, you’ll see what I mean about the boomers, and this doesn’t just represent a recent change. And note that older boomers and younger boomers seem to have behaved somewhat differently from each other, as well, with younger ones consistently being more liberal than the older group:

The clearest pattern is that younger voters who turned 18 during the presidencies of Clinton, Bush or Obama ”“the younger members of Gen X and the Millennial generation ”“ have typically voted much more Democratic than the average. In contrast, voters who turned 18 during the Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr. presidencies ”“much of Generation X and younger Baby Boomers”“ have voted somewhat more Republican than the average.

The picture is less clear for older generations. Those who turned 18 during the Nixon administration ”“ a segment of older Baby Boomers ”“ have tended to be slightly more Democratic than average in their voting. Those who came of age during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson years ”“ mostly members of the Silent generation and the very oldest of the Baby Boomers ”“have tended to be more Republican than the average, especially in 2008.

And before you laud the Greatest Generation as being the conservative ones, take a look at this:

The Greatest generation is dwindling in numbers, but at least until recently their Democratic tendencies were still evident. Voters who turned 18 during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt consistently voted more Democratic than average.

All of this doesn’t mean that I’m a boomer booster, or that I don’t see why people are so pissed about them. There’s a tendency among the most vocal and visible boomers (who may or may not represent the generation as a whole) to come across as arrogant, selfish, histrionic, narcissistic, and foolishly and destructively iconoclastic. My generation was instrumental in the dismantling of a great many institutions and traditions that held the fabric of society together, and we are all feeling the pain today.

But we certainly had some good music.

It turns out that the Benghazi whistleblowers…

The New Neo Posted on by

…have some pretty good credentials:

Appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be three career State Department officials: Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attacks; Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for Operations in the agency’s Counterterrorism Bureau; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer who was the regional security officer in Libya, the top security officer in the country in the months leading up to the attacks.

Of the three, only Nordstrom doesn’t consider himself a whistleblower. But he’s certainly acting as one. He is the only one of the three who has testified before (before the all-important 2012 election) [emphasis mine]:

“For me the Taliban is on the inside of the [State Department] building,” Nordstrom testified [on Oct 12, 2012], angry over inadequate staffing at a time when the threat environment in Benghazi was deteriorating…

The lawyers said their clients believe their accounts of Benghazi were spurned by the Accountability Review board (ARB), the official investigative body convened by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to review the terrorist attacks, and that the two employees have faced threats and intimidation from as-yet-unnamed superiors.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi — that people have been threatened,” Toensing told Fox News on Wednesday. “And not just the State Department; people have been threatened at the CIA”¦.It’s frightening”¦.They’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over.”

That’s pretty chilling stuff, but should come as no surprise to anyone here who’s been following this from the start. The question I ask now is one I’ve been asking for many many months: what difference will it make?

The article linked here is from Fox. I can’t find anything about this story in any liberal news outlet. I wonder what will happen as the testimony goes forward; will the MSM refuse to cover the hearings at all? Or will it cover them minimally and just spin whatever is said there?

I also wonder what took so long for the whistleblowers to have their public say, but my guess is that the intimidation was pretty powerful. What’s more, I wonder why they are coming out now to speak. There are several untold stories here, and one of them is the many ways in which this information was suppressed in order to allow Barack Obama to be elected to a second term. Now, it really may not make a difference; he’s not going to be impeached, no matter what he did or didn’t do. The biggest effect (and here I’m being optimistic) may be to hurt Hillary Clinton’s changes of becoming president in 2016.

More Boomers are committing suicide

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s particularly true for men in their 50s, for whom the rate has jumped by a factor of 50% (up to 30 per 100,000) during the first decade of the twenty-first century. For women ages 60-64 the rate jumped 60% during the same period, although their actual rate of suicide is a lot lower, 7.0 per 100,000.

In general during that same decade, suicide rates among the middle-aged rose about 30%, with men in that age group committing suicide about 3 times more often than women (if I remember correctly from my college classes on the subject, males have long been the ones who kill themselves more often, while women have historically had more attempts, at least partly because males tend to use the more fail-safe methods such as guns while women tend to use pills).

The article floats several theories, but no one seems to know. One that makes intuitive sense is that these men may be one of the groups hardest hit by the financial reversals of the past few years. However, the statistics are for 1999-2010, so it’s hard to see how that can be the main reason since the downturn only really got going in the latter part of 2008. It would be helpful to know more about whether the increase in suicide has been evenly distributed across the whole decade or whether it spiked after 2008, and whether it is higher among the newly unemployed or has marked regional or ethnic variations. For example, it’s not hard to imagine that being widely reviled as “old white men” could have a disproportionate effect on—well, on oldish white men.

Some, although not all, of these questions are answered by going to the report itself. The stats are not broken down there by years or occupations, but the report does mention that all four regions of the US experienced the increase. What’s more, although the biggest suicide increase was among native Americans, whites were next (men and women). The method with the greatest increase was suffocation (that’s almost always hanging), which may account for some of the higher lethality. And other age groups did not experience similar increases in suicide.

Another interesting fact embedded in the Times article is that Boomers have had higher rates of suicide than other cohorts for a long time, even as adolescents. Are Boomers especially prone to high expectations, and depression when they are not fulfilled? Are they less religious, or less connected to other people?

[NOTE: The comments section of the Times article—at least the first twenty or so comments, which are all I read—is filled with really sad stories about Boomers and job loss, providing anecdotal evidence that this could be a big part of the cause.]

Venezuela: the fat lady hasn’t sung

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the election in Venezuela? Well, it’s not over yet:

The self-declared winner, Nicolé¡s Maduro, is behaving very much like a man who knows he lost on April 14. In resorting to violence and brute force to silence the opposition’s demand for an honest recount, Maduro has signed the death warrant for chavismo’s legitimacy.

Numerous videos of soldiers and other chavista thugs chasing, beating, and shooting unarmed protesters have circulated around the world since last month’s election. Last night, video from Venezuela’s national assembly showed opposition members being beaten as they protested a gag rule imposed by assembly president Diosdado Cabello.

Maduro may be widely thought to be illegitimate, but he may still be able to hold onto power if his thugs succeed in intimidating both the opposition and the voters.

The hand of Cuba can be seen:

It is remarkable to see assembly president Cabello leading the charge against the opposition ”” in other words, doing the dirty work for Maduro and Havana. Cabello was thought to have the confidence of many in the military who chafed at the heavy hand of Cubans who are desperate to micromanage the post-Ché¡vez succession to ensure the flow of aid and oil to the bankrupt Castro regime. By following Havana’s instructions, Cabello is leading Venezuela’s military into a moral ambush ”” putting soldiers in a position of having to murder peaceful protestors in the service of a foreign regime and a corrupt, illegitimate despot.

Oil again—the kingdom of earth.

Is the Middle East becoming a has-been?

The New Neo Posted on by

For the better part of a century the Middle East has been like a girl who was an ugly duckling turned into a swan, courted by all and sundry because of her newfound beauty and unaware that her looks might fade.

She can become accustomed to men fawning over her and tolerating her misbehavior, and get to thinking it’s not just her beauty that gives her such power. And yet her looks are her currency in the world, and as she ages she is likely to find to her surprise that the world no longer cares all that much about her.

That may be happening to the Middle East, according to Victor Davis Hanson. With relative rapidity the world has discovered ways to extract precious oil from more difficult-to-retrieve deposits in other parts of the globe, threatening Middle Eastern dominance of the market. The Middle Eastern (mostly Arab, but Iran is heavily involved as well) nations involved have never seemed to have much of a contingency plan for this eventuality (like the young beauty who fails to get her college degree or snag a rich husband), or if they have they failed to implement it.

One of the new kids on the block is, paradoxically enough, Israel, which has discovered its own vast gas and oil reserves and is poised to exploit them. Hanson believes that this will change Europe’s attitude:

Most likely, Europe’s past opportunistic disdain of Israel and fawning over Arab autocracies were based entirely on oil politics. In the future, the fair-weather European Union will as likely move away from the Middle East as it will pledge a newfound friendship with the once unpopular but now resource-rich Israel.

“Entirely”? I’m not so sure I agree with Hanson there; I think Europe’s hatred of Israel has been multiply-determined and has much deeper and wider roots than that. I’d like to be wrong and have him proven right, though. I do think, however, that there’s at least some truth to what he says, and that therefore the future may at least hold a chance for a change in Europe’s attitude towards Israel to a sort of grudgingly pragmatic peaceful co-existence.

Or, as post-WWII British Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin once observed (1948), “The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil.” Is the oil scepter in the process of being passed?

If so, let’s hope the unforeseen consequences of that change do not include a paroxysm of rage in the Arab Middle East and Iran that ignites a new wave of terrorism at the prospect of being passed over in terms of influence and power.