Posted on 10/28/2013 10:03:29 AM PDT by MissesBush
President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”
Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.
Darrell Delamaide, a columnist for Dow Jones’s MarketWatch, says that “what has baffled many observers is how Jarrett, a former cog in the Chicago political machine and a real-estate executive, can exert such influence on policy despite her lack of qualifications in national security, foreign policy, economics, legislation or any of the other myriad specialties the president needs in an adviser.”
Delamaide believes the term “vacuous cipher” that was applied to Jarrett stung so much because it could be used as a metaphor for the administration in general. He writes that what “has remained consistent about the Obama administration is that vacuity — the slow response in a crisis, the hesitant and contradictory communication, a lack of conviction and engagement amid constant political calculation.” The stunning revelation that President Obama wasn’t kept properly apprised of problems with Obamacare’s website is just the latest example of how dysfunctional Obama World can be.
Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge.
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”
When the revealing histories of the Obama White House are written it will be fascinating to learn just how extensive her role in the key decisions of the Obama years was.
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They used to commit people who talked like this to the "other hospital".
Seriously deranged thinking.
I have never heard of an individual SO close to a President and SO completely influencing a President, that the MSM HAS NOT interviewed and DOES NOT ATTEMPT to interview!
Can you imagine someone THAT intimately and directly involved with the administration of a Conservative President that the MSM would not positively DEMAND to appear for a face-to-face interview?
THE MSM would have had their tax returns for the last 5 decades, their every grade school report card, the name of their every associate, their f’n blood type, etc. and it STILL wouldn't be enough!
Without actually knowing a damn thing, I blame Rove for the way that Bush reacted to Katrina. Karl kept making remarks about the governor and mayor being Democrats.
Sometimes I wonder if Connie Rice did not play a similar role in the Bush Administration?
If you look at the Bush administration you find that there was a lot of business and managerial experience. Bush made selections form top leaders. 0 on the other hand took acquaintances and friends to make his staff of amateurs.
“He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
He’s just too arrogant to do what ordinary people do.
Fixed it.
Thank you. I wholeheartedly agree.
Even most Democrats MUST be admitting to themselves that The Emperor has no clothes. Even as Svengali Jarrett tells him he is ‘The King of the World’.
I was thinking about what happened in Iraq after Saddaam was overthrown. The “Bush Doctrine” was so contrary to the purposes stated for going in.
And never EVER mocked!
Could have been Saudi influence.
Rove viewed every decision with a political slant and I think Jarrett does the same. At the of the day I think both will be seen as colossal mistakes. Once can only hope that once Obama's out of office then Jarrett goes into political consulting and screws up Democrat candidate races as badly as Rove has screwed up Republican ones.
I disagree. With Rove it was political. With Jarrett it's ideological - everything must lead to socialism.
What do you mean, she is kept in the background? She is his handler and knows everything.
And keep in mind this is the same media that helped spread the myth they're now having to retreat from in the light of recent information developed in at least one new book by one of their fellow MSM journalists that Cheney was the force behind the scenes pulling W's puppet strings. This was a constant drum beat from the MSM during the Bush years. Yet we have a real Rasputin her in the Obama admin in the form of this vapid twit Jarrett and the media is silent about her. At least Cheney, unlike Jarrett, was on the ballot when Bush won both times.
I like the comparison that she is a Keeper from Babylon Five.
Bammy apparently can do 9th grade math.
HAHAHAHAHA
Headline gets it wrong. Not Obama’s Valerie Jarrett. It is VJ who has Obama on a leash — at the command of the Soros Overlords.
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