Remember that time the White House deceived those gullible Americans about the Iran deal? Haha, good times!

That was the undeniable tone of a recent New York Times profile of President Barack Obama‘s national security advisor Ben Rhodes. In the profile, Rhodes goes on at length about his failed attempt to become a novelist, and how he sees his work at the White House as essentially the same kind of storytelling and narrative-weaving. And when crafting his non-fictional storylines involved selling the American people fiction, well, Rhodes was more than up to the task.

Apologies for the long block quote, but it really does need to be read to be believed:

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency…

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration.

By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

It’d be one thing if the New York Times dug through archives, spoke with anonymous government officials in hushed tones, and independently came to the conclusion that the White House was lying to Americans about the purpose and history behind the Iran deal. That factoid alone ought to be the front page headline in papers across the country rather than consigned to page 44 of the Sunday magazine.

To say nothing of that last paragraph, where we learn that the long-term policy goal of the administration is to “disengage” from Israel and our Arab allies and wash our hands of the Middle East. In line with that policy, the purpose of the Iran deal is not to protect our allies, but to abandon them…..

(MEDIA’ITE | and see TWITCHY)

…For the past two and a half years this nation has been roiled by the incessant drumbeat of accusations that its newly elected President, Donald Trump, was a clandestine agent of Russia and colluded with them to alter the outcome of the 2016 election.  On their face, these accusations were so preposterous that anyone with a modicum of common sense would have thought them totally unbelievable.  

Nonetheless, within 7 months after Trump’s inauguration 54% of all Americans believed he had acted illegally or unethically in his dealings with Russia (80% of Democrats).  Within 14 months after the inauguration 66% of Democrats believed Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected and 59% accepted the premise that there were improper relations between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 election. 

In what was a staged and unnecessary inquiry, and despite turning over every marginally relevant leaf and conducting a dogged 22-month investigation using partisan prosecutors, Robert Mueller was unable to link Donald Trump or his campaign to even the minutest degree of collusion with the Russian Government.  Nonetheless the drumbeat of lies and insinuations was a major factor in the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

The American citizenry now definitively knows that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the presidential campaign of 2016.  Further, based on the testimony of Rod Rosenstein and others involved in the Special Counsel probe, the Russians did not tamper with any vote tallies. 

How were the Democrats, and their allies in the mainstream media able to suspend rationality and manipulate the emotions of so many Americans for so long?  

[….]

From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (791 days), the major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage.  During this period no other issue received more than 10% of this level of attention.  Further, the spin of the overall network coverage of Donald Trump was 92% negative. 

Two cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, each devoted, on the average, nearly 2 to 3 hours per day on Trump and Russia collusion, or an estimated 1,978 hours (118,700 minutes) since the inauguration.  Virtually all the coverage was negative with innumerable false and misleading reports, accusations of treason, supposed imminent arrests and the unabashed reporting of any salacious or unproven rumor or allegation. 

The print media went down the same path as their counterparts in the electronic media.  The New York Times and The Washington Post between them published nearly 1,000 front page articles on the subject and had to issue numerous retractions days later after the damage was done.  That process was repeated by news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, pumping out to its newspaper, radio and television station subscribers throughout the United States daily stories negative to Trump regarding collusion.

On a near daily basis, so-called celebrities in Hollywood and the entertainment establishment unabashedly regurgitated to their untold millions of followers on social media virtually all the false stories and innuendos promulgated by the media and the Democratic Party.

The illegal and unethical maneuvering of the upper echelon of the FBI and Department of Justice immediately after the inauguration to appoint a special counsel added gravitas to the accusations regarding Trump and the Russians, as well as a means of finding anything that would either implicate Donald Trump in any potential criminality, or misbehavior outside of the Russian matter that could lead to impeachment.  Further, their willing accomplices in the media breathlessly reported, without hesitation or confirmation, any leak or innuendo from these same denizens of the deep state.

The Democrats in Congress, undeterred by ethics or the laws of slander and defamation, were free to fabricate or leak stories regarding Russian collusion that were accepted at face value by their allies in the media….

(AMERICAN THINKER)