Writing in Tablet today, Lee Smith, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, posted a must-read commentary about the selling of Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. Check out the excerpt below:
Politico recently reported that in 2016 the Obama administration freed seven Iranian-born prisoners against the advice of the Department of Justice, which considered them threats to American national security. Obama also forced the DOJ to drop charges against another 14 Iranians involved in criminal activities associated with nuclear proliferation, weapons smuggling, etc.
Why? How else was President Barack Obama going to celebrate a historic nuclear deal with a country that had kidnapped Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. Pay us or we’ll embarrass you. Pay us, or we might walk out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
So the administration shipped $400 million in cash to the same Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that put Rezaian and others in jail and freed Iranian agents involved in illegal nuclear-related activities, to preserve the arms agreement that was supposed to stop Iran from engaging in such activities, in order to save a nuclear deal that all but guarantees that Iran will acquire the bomb.
A few months after Obama left the White House, people are starting to realize there was some strange stuff happening the last few years on Pennsylvania Avenue. The things that seemed to make sense last year—like exchanging Iranian crooks and spies for ordinary American citizens—now look ridiculous. And it’s clear why the deliberate urgency with which the administration messaged its Iran policy had the feel of an advertising campaign—because it was an advertising campaign, crafted to convince consumers that something you think is bad for you is actually good for you.
To sell something that superficial, the Obama White House needed help from a generation of blogging young guns who were effectively parasitic on the professional reporters who remained in the D.C. press corps. These were the Explainers. Smart, well-read, and glibly cynical in the fashion of recent liberal-arts college graduates, the Explainers had no experience or training in basic journalistic arts, like reporting or interviewing. Because there was no one around to teach this cadre its trade, their role models weren’t war correspondents like John Burns and C.J. Chivers, or dedicated diggers and investigators like David Sanger and Jay Solomon. Nor were they columnists like William Safire, who had high-level experience and dozens or hundreds of high-level sources inside the federal government.
No, the Explainers competed for the angle—who could frame a subject in the most vitally counterintuitive way that would leave their buddies on Twitter speechless. X reports from the capital of Y that this is happening, and here’s what that really means, bro.
Read the rest here.
How Gladwellian Internet ‘hot takes’ fueled the new echo-chamber press that enabled Obama's foreign policy—and still rules Washington
Writing in Tablet today, Lee Smith, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, posted a must-read commentary about the selling of Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. Check out the excerpt below:
Politico recently reported that in 2016 the Obama administration freed seven Iranian-born prisoners against the advice of the Department of Justice, which considered them threats to American national security. Obama also forced the DOJ to drop charges against another 14 Iranians involved in criminal activities associated with nuclear proliferation, weapons smuggling, etc.
Why? How else was President Barack Obama going to celebrate a historic nuclear deal with a country that had kidnapped Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. Pay us or we’ll embarrass you. Pay us, or we might walk out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
So the administration shipped $400 million in cash to the same Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that put Rezaian and others in jail and freed Iranian agents involved in illegal nuclear-related activities, to preserve the arms agreement that was supposed to stop Iran from engaging in such activities, in order to save a nuclear deal that all but guarantees that Iran will acquire the bomb.
A few months after Obama left the White House, people are starting to realize there was some strange stuff happening the last few years on Pennsylvania Avenue. The things that seemed to make sense last year—like exchanging Iranian crooks and spies for ordinary American citizens—now look ridiculous. And it’s clear why the deliberate urgency with which the administration messaged its Iran policy had the feel of an advertising campaign—because it was an advertising campaign, crafted to convince consumers that something you think is bad for you is actually good for you.
To sell something that superficial, the Obama White House needed help from a generation of blogging young guns who were effectively parasitic on the professional reporters who remained in the D.C. press corps. These were the Explainers. Smart, well-read, and glibly cynical in the fashion of recent liberal-arts college graduates, the Explainers had no experience or training in basic journalistic arts, like reporting or interviewing. Because there was no one around to teach this cadre its trade, their role models weren’t war correspondents like John Burns and C.J. Chivers, or dedicated diggers and investigators like David Sanger and Jay Solomon. Nor were they columnists like William Safire, who had high-level experience and dozens or hundreds of high-level sources inside the federal government.
No, the Explainers competed for the angle—who could frame a subject in the most vitally counterintuitive way that would leave their buddies on Twitter speechless. X reports from the capital of Y that this is happening, and here’s what that really means, bro.
Read the rest here.
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