Huckster

Toward the end of the book tour from hell, Samantha Power turned up for an interview on BBC’s HARDtalk with Stephen Sackur. Paul Mirengoff drew on this interview for a well-deserved parting shot at Power. Martin Kramer declares that Sackur “pummeled” Power, and Sackur is indeed a relentless interviewer. Video of the interview is posted here.
Not having heard Power before, I was most struck by what a fast talker and slippery customer she is. She is at the same time self-righteous, high-minded, and utterly unserious — in short, a pompous phony. The Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook comments perceptively that “Power’s very bad book tour told us as much about Obama as it did about her.”
If she is, as she declared during her book tour, lacking in “conventional political ambition” (according to Power, unlike Condoleezza Rice), she is nevertheless a creature of some other conventional ambition. She’s certainly willing to do anything to sell a book.
Via Michael Rubin in NRO’s Corner.
JOHN adds: It’s too bad, really, that Power is departing the scene. Her childishly incoherent thinking has been a valuable window into the mind of Barack Obama. In her BBC interview, there was a shocking exchange that has–amid Power’s many other gaffes–been too little reported. It came when the BBC reporter asked Power whether she thinks Iraq has been lost. This was sort of a trick question, since she clearly says so in the book she is promoting on the “book tour from Hell.” So the question quickly evolved into, Does Obama agree with you that the Iraq war is lost? In trying to wriggle out of the question, Power volunteers that the concept of “winning” or “losing” in foreign policy is obsolete in the “21st century:”


My guess is that any administration that believes the concept of “winning” is obsolete is destined to do a lot of losing.
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