Cooper: Is Iran spin really a surprise?

For those who have paid attention, no one can be surprised that a wannabe fiction writer who now serves as a deputy national security adviser to the president of the United States was able to create a gold-plated narrative around the nuclear deal with Iran and sell it to a lapdog Washington, D.C., media.

Today, Ben Rhodes' candid comments to David Samuels in the New York Times Magazine about his ability to do that have created somewhat of a furor, especially among those who did not understand that electing an untested, inexperienced former community organizer to the most powerful job in the world was a dangerous prospect indeed.

After all, then-candidate Barack Obama said he had in mind "fundamentally transforming" America. He didn't spell out how he'd do it, but the "hope" and "change" spin was easily transferred to a spin-driven White House.

The Beltway media was all in, so it wasn't a hard sell.

"All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," Rhodes said. "Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."

The deputy national security adviser, who doesn't "know anymore where I begin and Obama ends," is now all of 38 years old and was only a shade over 30 when he began his job on the first day of the Obama White House.

To boil the skillful Rhodes' manipulation down to its essence, his job was to convince the media - and thus the American people - that the U.S. State Department had found and was able to negotiate with moderates in Iran in an effort to quell their drive toward nuclear weapons.

In fact, the Obama White House had begun secret talks with hard-liner Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the spin would be that the breakthrough came with the election in the summer of 2013 of supposedly (but not actually) moderate President Hassan Rouhani. The media then could lean on planted arms control experts to back up the White House, Rhodes explained.

"We created an echo chamber," he said. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."

And Rhodes worked doggedly to shape and have the witless media attack any opposition - Bush-era necons, Israel supporters, partisan Republicans, even French President François Hollande. When Hollande doubted the seriousness of the talks, Christopher Dickey of the Daily Beast was only happy to write: "Why France Is to Blame for Blocking the Iran Nuclear Agreement."

The end result, of course, was a nuclear deal that gave Iran almost everything it wanted and the United States almost nothing it said it must have.

So, we cannot say we are surprised at this revelation by Obama's foreign policy spinmeister. Recall, after all, only two years ago when Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber remarked how the administration took advantage of the "stupidity of the American voter" to accept its lies - he called it "lack of transparency" - to pass a law that turned over a sixth of the U.S. economy to the government.

How much gullibility is enough? Four more years, this president's "third term" in the name of another person, would be far too much.

Upcoming Events