’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life,” former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. “Though none as immortalized as that one.”
.. What Samantha Power regrets is allowing documentarians to record the election-night party she threw, in the words of Susan Glasser, “for all 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to celebrate what they all expected to be Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory.”
.. The cameras “immortalized” Power and company’s colossal self-regard and misjudgment, thus making the film, The Final Year, a fitting send-off for the Obama crew.
.. “As a host, I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be quite the blowout it was anticipated to be, because I wanted to make sure that people had a chance to interact with Gloria Steinem,”
.. a rejection of military deterrence in favor of negotiation and accommodation with undemocratic great powers and their proxies
.. he supercilious reference to ISIS as the “JV team,”
.. the constant tweaking and trolling of conservatives and Republicans to make them batty, and all enacted with an omnipresent and choking air of moral and intellectual superiority and pride
.. So convinced is Power of the righteousness of her positions and stature and the inevitable course of History and Progress that Trump appears to her almost as an apparition, a figure from a different dimension, far removed from any universe in which she and her boss lived and acted.
.. The former president’s amanuensis, Ben Rhodes, the first deputy national security adviser in American history to hold an MFA in creative writing from NYU and the architect of the echo chamber that propagandized for the Iran deal
.. Here is a man famous for his arrogance and condescension not only toward ideological opponents but also toward the foreign policy establishment
.. “For Ben Rhodes not to be able to speak, you know something really unusual has happened,”
.. so enamored of themselves and of their mission, so ensconced in the protective Snuggie that their fan boys in the media provided them
Samantha Power Unmasked
Why would a diplomat need to know the names of Trump officials?
The new subpoenas seek details of all unmasking requests in 2016 by three people: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Democrats claim Ms. Rice needed to unmask names to do her job, though this is questionable given that she wasn’t running counterintelligence investigations. They have a better claim with Mr. Brennan.
But Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens?