If you watched the Emmys last night, my condolences. I didn’t tune in for a bunch of Democrats further alienating America and making themselves even more of a fringe party, because I can get that by turning on any channel of TV, or looking at any other form of media, at any hour of an average day in 2017. Putting Stephen Colbert in a tuxedo to do it for a few hours on a Sunday night in September seems redundant, but let them have their fun. This is all they have left.
At one point during the proceedings, Colbert brought out Sean Spicer to make a joke about crowd sizes. Get it? Because of that one time?
Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters got the joke, and they didn’t like it one bit. This reaction in particular seemed pretty funny to me:
Interesting choice by Emmys to let someone joke about demonstrably lying to the American people on behalf of the most powerful person in US
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) September 18, 2017
That’s great. Hey, remember what Ben Rhodes used to do for a living?
As a reminder, here’s an excerpt from David Samuels’ NYT profile of Rhodes back in May 2016:
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.
Which is a long way for Samuels to go just to say: The Obama administration lied about the Iran deal, and Ben Rhodes crafted the lie. He did everything he could to help a bunch of genocidal religious zealots get their own nukes.
And when it worked, Rhodes sneered at the “journalists” he’d snookered into helping him:
“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.”
Not that he’s wrong, but you’d think he’d be a bit more grateful for their invaluable assistance in lying to the American people about something very important.
And now, that same guy is outraged because Sean Spicer lied about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration, and the Emmys invited him on to joke about it.
So, when Jerusalem disappears in a ball of nuclear fire, take a moment to pray for Ben Rhodes. After all his hard work to make it happen, he didn’t even get to go onstage at the Emmys.