The Final Year, Thank God (2)

As I have said a time or two before, Samantha Power made a name for herself with a book proclaiming our obligation to stop genocide abroad. Once she took office in the Obama administration, however, she became an apologist for Obama’s detachment from the catastrophe in Syria and his deal with the genocidal maniacs in Iran, among other things. It’s almost enough to make one question her bona fides, or even to suspect she may be a complete fraud. Dante might even add a circle of hell to his vision of hell to accommodate her.

No one has done justice to the phenomenon of Samantha Power. It might be the task of a lifetime. Seth Mandel nevertheless made a good start of it in the 2017 Commentary essay “The cautionary tale of Samantha Power.”

Power played an untold role in the “unmasking” of Trump transition officials caught up in foreign surveillance. She has testified that certain of the “unmasking” requests were made by others using her name. Perhaps someday we’ll know the truth. She should be in the middle of an old-fashioned scandal. Is anyone on the case?

In March Power took to Twitter to comment on the mad barking former CIA Director John Brennan. Lee Smith, incidentally, has demonstrated that Brennan is himself a protagonist in the underlying scandal. A reasonable reader might infer that Power is aware of the hazard of exclusion from Brennan’s circle of love, or interpret it an advisory from one who knows.

Lest she be thought to have committed a Kinsley gaffe by accidentally blurting the truth — it’s not her style — Power tried to clear it all up.

Along with John Kerry and Ben Rhodes, Power is one of the stars of Greg Barker’s HBO documentary The Final Year. In my view, the documentary might have made for slightly more palatable viewing if it had been titled The Final Year, Thank God. Featuring Power, Ben Rhodes, and John Kerry, the movie is suffused with their self-regard, their professed love of humanity beyond the borders of the United States, and their disdain for the rest of us. Borrowing a term from the law of defamation, I find these three to represent a loathsome disease.

Washington Post opinion writer and editor Christian Caryl spoke with Barker, Power, and Rhodes in the 25-minute discussion of the film in the video posted here on YouTube along with many hostile comments. At about 14:30, Caryl gingerly raises the question of Syria. Russia also comes up toward the end. One can view five minutes more with this gruesome threesome flaunting an attitude amped up for AV Club posted here on YouTube. Power virtually defies belief. She must have been concocted somewhere in a laboratory to prove a point.

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