Commentary
With the drop of a name, long forgotten, heard while watching Gutfeld!, the popular late-night show on Fox News Channel, my memory of the corruptness of the Obama administration was stirred.
During her guest appearance on Gutfeld, Morgan Ortagus, a staff assistant to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, 2019-2021, casually dropped the name of Ben Rhodes, while commenting on the media’s cover-up of President Biden’s age and mental acuity.
Ben Rhodes … Ben Rhodes. Kramer you’re slipping, I thought. You’ve written about President Obama’s influence on the Biden administration, and you could have been reminding your readers of how Rhodes, too, manipulated the media while claiming to have the most transparent administration in history.
A look back in my archives, I found two pieces I had written about Obama and his foreign policy advisor Rhodes. The first, on May 7, 2016, I wrote how Rhodes had duped the public on the Iran nuclear deal by creating a false narrative.
Rhodes pushed information leading us to believe the administration was dealing with Iranian moderates, while we were actually talking to the ayatollahs.
Often criticizing journalists for their lack of knowledge in foreign affairs, he took advantage of their naivete’, feeding them information to fit the Obama agenda.
I wrote then, call it what you will – deceit, lying, cover-up, dishonesty, misinformation, stonewalling, even scandalous – it was the make-up of the Obama administration as the most corrupt in history, easily supplanting Nixon’s Watergate.
Of course, we now recognize that corruption in the Biden administration tops that of Obama’s … misrepresenting the president’s health, denying the president’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s dealings, and influencing an election through the weaponizing of the Justice Department for starters.
I noted then that Obama leaned heavily on Rhodes and an inner circle of young aides, who had been with him through his 2008 campaign. Later, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates wrote of Rhodes being “out of his depth in foreign policy and miliary matters,” while the late Sen. John McCain called Rhodes a “political hack.”
While refreshing my memory on the Obama era, an August 23, 2018 New Yorker magazine piece about former Obama officials undermining the incoming Trump administration surfaced.
It noted how Trump advisors had concluded that the new administration faced a sophisticated threat of a coordinated attack, and circulated a memo, “The Echo Chamber,” which read like a military intelligence officer’s analysis of a foreign insurgent network, however, the memo described a network consisting of former Obama aides.
It accused members of mounting a coordinated effort to undermine President Trump and his advisors. Rhodes was cited as the “likely brain behind this operation.” Some of its members referred to themselves as “the resistance.”
Re-reading the article, I couldn’t help but view this as the early stage of the Deep State, an entity of which I have written extensively, made up primarily of staffers and bureaucrats in the alphabet organizations – DNI, FBI and CIA.
The Deep State is alive and well working to prevent Trump from returning to the White House. They know he plans to continue to drain the Swamp.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
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