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Wikipedia: {A}ttending New York University and [Ben Rhodes] graduat[ed] in 2002 with an MFA in creative writing.

. . . and has been writing fiction ever since.

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It is not just lying in government -- it is lying EVERYWHERE.

This is a sea change from the mid-20th century US, which I remember. At that time, exposure of a lie of any importance could easily get someone in deep trouble. Now, meh, "all people lie!"

Because lying rots society -- it is, after all, a failure in *reciprocal* human connection -- it would be instructive to examine just how this change came to be.

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Thank you, Glenn, for continuing to bring the truth to light.

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As it's turned out Mr. Snowden was very lucky that he wound up in Russia, one of very few countries who can and will stand up to the empire. Europe has turned out to be a giant vassal state with Quislings for political leaders. Vladimir Putin for all the bad press he gets in the west, mostly because he stood up to the empire and his own oligarchs. After the criminal yeltsin had people starving from turning the country over foreign and domestic oligarchs, he brought tens of millions out of poverty despite everything the west could throw at Russia. Ask Julian Assange if he would have been better off in Russia than the UK. The other country that will stand up to the empire and has by far the largest "real " economy is, of course, China where those terrible authoritarians have brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty including people outside China because they don't screw over countries like the IMF & WORLD Banksters etc. In 2008 and now, China builds infrastructure including more kilometers of high speed rail and more G5 antennas than the rest of the world. Usa has ZERO high speed rail and way behind on G5. BTW Afghanistan had a democratic secular government before Jimmy Carter and Brezinski destroyed it. The same with Iran before the usa destroyed it for the British. Truman wouldn't do it but Eisenhower did. Having lived in the usa for a few years, I've seen the nasty underbelly, the hoods and the hollers and they ain't pretty, nor is the drug addiction and omnipresent crime and poverty, jails with more inmates than any other country, almost all plea bargain cases and related to poverty, lousy housing and schools with few able to escape the system. Let me know when Assange gets out, gets an apology and a huge settlement, I'm not holding my breath.

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I'll always be disappointed Trump did not pardon Snowden and Assange.

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Susan Rice, in her book "Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For", essentially spreads the same lies about Snowden, while adding her own lie that Snowden gave all the data he had stolen to Russia. But we would have to rely on our political elites to change course and bring these behaviors to an end. That would be like pissing in the wind. Just look at what happened to the Lt. Colonel who spoke up about Afghanistan.

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A very clear case of malignant prevarication. This is an administration that spied on an opposition candidate using the security services. This is an administration that weaponized the IRS. This is an administration that left an American ambassador and other Americans to die ignominiously and lied about it. These are very bad people.

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Thank you for identifying this as sociopathy. In an age that has seemed to have lost all perspective of just how nefarious the US government has become, finally, finally a legitimate journalist calls is precisely what it is. It is *not* hyperbole. Sociopaths do not feel or empathize with their victims. They have no remorse. They incessantly if not addictively self aggrandize at any cost, human or otherwise. And these types of people pursue government positions. And in recent years, security state is a noteworthy example.

But this goes well beyond the security state into many if not most parts of the government.

What’s dangerous is when “normal” Americans become so wrapped up in their party that they let this pass, or even worse, defend it or support it. Normal humans - even having marked differences in ideology- have to stop these parties, both of which are full of sociopaths

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98%+ politicians and now I'm convinced MSM journalists are sociopaths whose only interests are power, self, and money.

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Rewriting history... the audacity of hope? Nope! The audacity of absolute, utter bullshit.

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The arrogance of Rhodes knows no bounds. It's either that, or this kind of flagrant deception has become so ingrained in his modus operandi that he didn't realize what he was actually divulging by including this.

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"And yet, over and over, Rhodes told the public the exact opposite of what he knew to be the truth."

And why do Rhodes and his ilk blatantly lie? Because they can. Because nothing serious is EVER done to stop them or punish them for lying. I'm not talking about an "early retirement" here, or a couple month probation there. Look at Clapper, Brennan, Lerner, Comey -- the list could go on and on but why bore you with what you already know?

Great, hard-hitting story, Glenn. Thank you.

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Ironic, isn't it - that the Rhodes, in essence, helped Snowden to stay in the one place he would be safe from US exradition - if he had gone to SA, he would have wound up like Assange ...

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I bet Ben Rhodes thought he was running the country for a time. There he is in on the cover of his masturbatory work, hovering above the Resolute Desk, full of important papers while Obama, hunched and desperate for wisdom, appeals to Rhodes' singular genius. One can imagine how horrible it is to know Ben Rhodes.

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Just as history will show the current administration to be the most profoundly incompetent one in the span of this nation, it will similarly show the Obama administration to be the most overtly duplicitous.

The MSM will of course instruct you otherwise.

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Very good piece. Please keep up the good work.

I.F. Stone was know to have said that the government bureaucrats would leave threads like this for us to figure out how they had deceived in the moment when they needed to. Your work is appreciated by some - and denigrated by the same type of pro-government ideologues who denigrated Stone - but in the end we now realize how valuable Stone's writing was and maybe years from now your work will be similarly appreciated

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