The week in Washington: Twitter trolling, prostitution memos, and banning big words

Behold the administration that told us it was the Cult of Competence, led by No-Drama Obama, the adult in the room. First up, trolling an allied prime minister worried about the very existence of his people and country on Twitter.

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The White House is standing by a tweet mocking Israeli Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite concerns it could further sour relations between the two countries.

A White House tweet defending the framework nuclear agreement with Iran contained a cartoon bomb that was nearly identical to one in a chart used by Netanyahu in a 2012 speech urging the U.S. to take a harder line against Iran’s nuclear program.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued very strong criticisms of this deal,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said on Friday. “That’s entirely his right, but we are also going to issue strong defenses of this deal.

“It would make no sense for us to essentially not make our case,” Rhodes said.

The bomb diagram published by the White House shows that the framework deal would cut and cap Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and centrifuges. Netanyahu’s chart showed Iran on a path to accumulate enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised the geniuses who came up with this disastrous “deal” can’t possibly come up with a way to defend it aside from treating fellow leaders of the free world like they’re in a Facebook flame war. Chuck Todd told Hugh Hewitt, “I have a feeling they feel as if they’re losing the PR battle here a little bit.” Ya think? I’m sure this tweet will fix that right away.

Meanwhile over at the Department of Justice, I’m just gonna leave this here.
A real memo issued by Eric Holder to his staff:

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AG memo to All DOJ Personnel 4-10-15

Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 5.49.41 PM

We may be up to an unprecedented number of prostitution scandals in this administration, certainly for this century. (I don’t want to give short shrift to the Clinton or Kennedy White Houses.)

And, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf offered a critique this week of former Sec. of State Henry Kissinger’s joint op-ed with George Schultz on the Iran deal that David Brooks rightly ridiculed on Hugh Hewitt’s show as being even more childish than the White House’s tweet:

HUGH HEWITT: Let me play for you, by the way, since you bring up Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, this is State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf earlier today responding to that very op-ed.

MARIE HARF: I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives. I heard a lot of sort of big words and big thoughts in that piece, and those are certainly, there’s a place for that. But I didn’t hear a lot of alternatives about what they would do differently.

HEWITT: David Brooks, this is the critique of the critics, is that we don’t have a lot of alternatives. In fact, every critic I’ve heard has alternatives, and I’m sure Kissinger and Shultz do. But a lot of big words? Really?

DAVID BROOKS: Are we in nursery school? We’re not, no polysyllabic words? That’s about the lamest rebuttal of a piece by two senior and very well-respected foreign policy people as I’ve heard. Somebody’s got to come up with better talking points, whatever you think. And of course, there are alternatives. It’s not to allow them to get richer, but to force them to get a little poorer so they can fund fewer terrorism armies.

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Fittingly, she later got into a giant Facebook flame war over the Brooks response with a family friend during work hours on Friday. Because smart power.

We are in the best of hands. If you need a meme.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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