James Taranto at the WSJ
"Ben Rhodes worked for eight full years as Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and speechwriting, a White House position that was inaugurated the same day Mr. Obama was. “Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal,” journalist David Samuels wrote in a 2016 profile. “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.”
"Is it possible that Mr. Rhodes’s talent for telling tales has gotten the better of him? This week he published “The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.” A chapter excerpted in the Atlantic magazine tells the story of the 2013 Syria debacle, in which Mr. Obama backed down from his 2012 warning to dictator Bashar Assad that using “a whole bunch of chemical weapons” would violate an American “red line.”
"Mr. Rhodes’s prose is engaging, and his Syria narrative, contrary to his slippery reputation, is astonishingly candid. We can attribute his honesty to a lack of self-awareness. He depicts himself, Mr. Obama and other members of the former president’s team as not only tragically indecisive and irresponsible but self-absorbed to the point of moral insensateness. Yet there is no indication Mr. Rhodes understands that his account is damning. He even writes a happy ending for Mr. Obama." . . .
