Samantha Power Regrets…Team Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson of 2016.

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‘I’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.”

Wow. It’s a major concession. And what might “that one” be?



Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then advocating a nuclear agreement that bankrolled the theocratic regime’s expansionism and militarism and corruption. Not serving as U.S. representative to an international body that took no effectual action to stop the Syrian civil war, in which more than 400,000 people have been killed, civilians gassed, and millions of refugees gone to Jordan, Turkey, and Europe. Not flacking for a president who, out of fear of reprisal, waited until a month after the 2016 election to punish Russia for interfering in American democracy, who spent years trying to coax Vladimir Putin onto the “off ramp” from the illegal annexation of Crimea, did nothing more than scold Russia after learning it had violated the INF treaty, reduced America’s nuclear deterrent at the very moment our adversaries were building up their armaments, denied Ukrainians lethal defensive aid against Russia-backed separatists, and routinely put up obstacles to domestic extraction industries that undercut Russia’s share of the energy market. She’s not talking about any of that.

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.”

Facepalm.

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. But back to that party: “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,” Power tells Glasser. You can see where she’s coming from. Imagine how awkward it would have been for Power if the election were called for Hillary before guests finished the tomato-soup shooters and the delegate from Timor-Leste told Steinem how cool it was to hear her sampled in the video for Jennifer Lopez’s “Ain’t Your Mama”? How would Power’s guests have spent the rest of the evening? Gossiping about Hillary’s pick for secretary of state while dealing hands of Cards Against Humanity as “Fight Song” played on a loop? That would have been a letdown. “I wanted to milk the soft power dividend of this moment,” Power goes on, in one of the weirdest and somewhat terrifying mixed metaphors I have ever encountered.

But of course the milk of soft power dividend was spoilt. Corrupt, inept, and entitled, Hillary did not win. Victory went to the orange ogre. The expected moment of triumph was suddenly and unexpectedly transfigured into a moment of surprise and agony and shame. And HBO was recording the whole thing. The embarrassment! “I think that scene moves viewers the most,” Power says now, “because it triggers, I think, a kind of post-traumatic stress about their own election night experience, which mirrored mine.”

Never does Power give any indication that the policies and character of the administration she served for eight years might have had some role in the outcome of the election. Weak economic growth, capricious and stultifying and often-unconstitutional regulation, a rejection of military deterrence in favor of negotiation and accommodation with undemocratic great powers and their proxies, the removal of troops from Iraq and the 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 — none of this factors in her analysis. 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. Another Obama mistake.

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“I think — I kept trying — beginning to say something, and the film shows that basically I can’t speak, because anything I was going to say was just going to be a kind of lame rationalization,” Rhodes says to Politico.

Wait… what? I thought that was the primary policy of the Obama administration… lame rationalizations for failures.

Something one shouldn’t do in defeat is let the opposition know you are suffering. You know what this whining by Powers is? Delicious. Great. Wonderful. I’m glad falling off of their mountain of arrogance was painful. I also hope they NEVER figure out why for I don’t EVER want liberals controlling the government again.

Now the Obama administration has become the Kardashians of politics. They are beloved because they are beloved, like the Kardashians are famous for being famous. No one asks what GOOD the Obama administration actually accomplished (we saw how painful those questions could be when Hillary supporters were asked what SHE had done to deserve the Presidency) or why so many different aspects they controlled turned really, really bad… they just love them because they are lovable. They are liberal, which is an entity all to itself. They think stuff that is nice (don’t worry about how those concepts fail miserably).