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Obama's Valerie Jarrett: Often Whispered about, But Never Challenged
National Review Online ^ | October 25, 2013 9:55 AM | John Fund

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.


TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: controller; jarrett; obamasbrain; obrain; slum; slumlord; thuggette; thugprinces; valeriejarrett; vj; wicked; witch
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Valerie Jarrett is perfectly emblematic of the incompetence and mediocrity that is the hallmark of this administration.
1 posted on 10/28/2013 10:03:29 AM PDT by MissesBush
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To: MissesBush

“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.” SHE KNOWS WHERE ALL OF THE SKELTONS ARE BURIED(couse SHE buried them)!


2 posted on 10/28/2013 10:08:36 AM PDT by US Navy Vet (Go Packers! Go Rockies! Go Boston Bruins! See, I'm "Diverse"!)
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To: MissesBush

She’s the actual President.....many have known this....


3 posted on 10/28/2013 10:09:41 AM PDT by C. Edmund Wright (Tokyo Rove is more than a name, it's a GREAT WEBSITE)
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To: MissesBush

Sometimes I wonder if Connie Rice did not play a similar role in the Bush Administration?


4 posted on 10/28/2013 10:10:41 AM PDT by RobbyS (quotes)
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To: US Navy Vet

Mommie problems.


5 posted on 10/28/2013 10:14:09 AM PDT by Paine in the Neck (Is John's moustache long enough YET?)
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To: MissesBush
Incompetence and mediocrity only skims the surface, IMO, on all things Obama.

“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.”

This is a depth of deceit that even Grima Wormtongue didn't approach.

6 posted on 10/28/2013 10:14:14 AM PDT by T-Bird45 (It feels like the seventies, and it shouldn't.)
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To: T-Bird45
he has never really been challenged intellectually

What bullsh*t......he's almost as gaffetastic as Biden since he's been shamed away from his 'Promptr.

7 posted on 10/28/2013 10:15:57 AM PDT by ErnBatavia (The 0baMao Experiment: Abject Failure)
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To: RobbyS
Sometimes I wonder if Connie Rice did not play a similar role in the Bush Administration?

She'd probably be more analagous to Karl Rove. She's Obama's Turd Blossom.

8 posted on 10/28/2013 10:17:19 AM PDT by DoodleDawg
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To: C. Edmund Wright

Rasputin; great comparison. He was a tough SOB to kill, too.


9 posted on 10/28/2013 10:19:32 AM PDT by henkster (Communists never negotiate.)
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To: C. Edmund Wright

She is Obama’s handler.


10 posted on 10/28/2013 10:20:58 AM PDT by laplata (Liberals don't get it .... their minds are diseased.)
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To: MissesBush

That broad creeps me out!


11 posted on 10/28/2013 10:21:27 AM PDT by SMARTY ("The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms." H. Amiel)
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To: SMARTY

She is pure Evil.


12 posted on 10/28/2013 10:22:11 AM PDT by laplata (Liberals don't get it .... their minds are diseased.)
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To: MissesBush

That’s because her ‘top cover’ pulls the strings of Obama.


13 posted on 10/28/2013 10:22:20 AM PDT by Portcall24
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To: MissesBush
--(whisper on)

--Valerie Jarrett is a Shape Shifter

-- Pass it On

--(whisper off)

14 posted on 10/28/2013 10:22:35 AM PDT by hummingbird (Don't be afraid of the big words.)
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To: laplata

actually, she IS Obama.....she is his inner voice, the one who keeps him “Obama’ even when all evidence around them indictes that remaining Obama is the wrong thing to do.


15 posted on 10/28/2013 10:22:46 AM PDT by C. Edmund Wright (Tokyo Rove is more than a name, it's a GREAT WEBSITE)
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To: C. Edmund Wright
She’s the actual President.....many have known this....

Hillary can never be the first woman President.

Valerie is currently


16 posted on 10/28/2013 10:30:32 AM PDT by Uri’el-2012 (Psalm 119:174 I long for Your salvation, YHvH, Your teaching is my delight.)
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To: MissesBush
--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.--

--the way this country is headed , these will never be allowed to be written or published---

17 posted on 10/28/2013 10:32:07 AM PDT by rellimpank (--don't believe anything the media or government says about firearms or explosives--)
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To: RobbyS

Condie Rice at least came into the administration with competency in foreign affairs. And no one seemed to despise her nor did she play a consigilieri role for W like Jarrett does with Obama, with anyone who dares question her being dispatched with. I don’t think there’s any similarity at all.


18 posted on 10/28/2013 10:33:58 AM PDT by MissesBush (The Fourth Estate has Become a Fifth Column)
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To: T-Bird45
This is a depth of deceit that even Grima Wormtongue didn't approach.

Excellent analogy. I shall now refer to her as Grima Wormtongue.


19 posted on 10/28/2013 10:36:31 AM PDT by Bloody Sam Roberts (So Obama "inherited" a mess? Firemen "inherit" messes too. Ever see one put gasoline on it?)
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To: MissesBush

Why do I always get the thought that we are in the last act of a Broadway Play and that when it is over one by one the cast of characters will be introduced and will come out take a bow and wait till the final character (O) is introduced and they will join hands take a final bow and leave the stage.


20 posted on 10/28/2013 10:38:39 AM PDT by kempster
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