"Every president, of course, creates a decision-making structure tailor-made for his own style."

"Franklin D. Roosevelt relied heavily on a kitchen cabinet. Harry S. Truman created the National Security Council to formally weigh options and coordinate among departments fighting the Cold War. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter turned the N.S.C. into an idea generator. In the Obama administration, members of the N.S.C. staff talked about 'death by Situation Room meeting' and compared the process of policymaking to watching a python swallow a pig."

From "Trump Follows His Gut. His National Security Advisers Try to Keep Up. Decisions come fast, even if contradictions and inconsistencies abound. But without much of a process, there is little preparation for how things can go wrong" (NYT).

And Trump? He has, we're told, "reduced the size of the N.S.C. staff by at least two thirds.... And when debates take place, the number of players often shrinks to a tiny group.... Not much leaks from those sessions, a major change from, say, the early Obama era, when Situation Room conversations sometimes appeared on news websites before the meetings were over."

So then we don't really have a way of knowing what goes on. Well, the NYT writer, David Sanger, presents us with a quote from Thomas Wright, "a scholar at the Brookings Institution who worked on long-term strategic planning in the National Security Council during the Biden years," who purports to tell us what "Trump seems to think," which is that "he doesn’t need options or contingency plans. He just wants a small team to execute his instincts."

"So we're dealing with what we're dealing with right now."

NEW: I asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) about Nancy Pelosi saying in 2011 that President Obama didn't need Congressional approval to bomb Libya, but Dems now say President Trump needs approval to bomb Iran?

Jeffries said Iran is "very different" & told me "I… pic.twitter.com/SkLr1R5wr1

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 3, 2026

"We're dealing with what we're dealing with right now" is an excuse for the ages. "This is different," he begins, and yet he hasn't worked out how it's different. He just needs it to be different. A dangerous move when you're winging it and don't know the facts of the things you're saying are different. There are a few seconds — 0:26 to 0:33 — where Jeffries knows he's in trouble. He mutters the hilarious line, "First of all, I was not in Congress," and shows a flash of shame before resetting with the all-purpose segue "So we're dealing with what we're dealing with right now."

"'You know, we’ve solved five wars,' he told reporters in the White House on Wednesday, without specifying which they were."

"Some of the conflicts he may have in mind are: India and Pakistan; the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda; Cambodia and Thailand; and, shortly it seems, Armenia and Azerbaijan.... From the Great Lakes of Africa to the summits of the Himalayas, he has taken a surprising interest in conflicts previously regarded as peripheral to US interests. In some areas he has had limited impact, or arguably (as in Ukraine) contributed to an intensification of hostilities. But in others, Trump’s peacemaking efforts have yielded some considerable results...."

I'm reading "How Trump hopes to win a Nobel peace prize/As he seeks ceasefires in Ukraine and Gaza, the US president claims to have ‘solved five wars.’ Is he right?" (London Times).

"While Trump may covet Obama’s success, some believe he risks falling into a trap by so avidly pursuing the prize."

Is he avidly pursuing the prize or is he trying to prove the point that they'll never give it to him, no matter what he does, and thus that the prize committee is hopelessly biased? Obama got the prize for doing absolutely nothing! Why strive to equal him? The impressive thing is to do far more and still not get the prize. That would be the greater achievement. 

"Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure/The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis..."

"... on viral election falsehoods but has struggled amid attacks from conservative politicians and activists." 

That's the headline at WaPo, and I'm wondering how the 2 parts of the headline relate to each other. Why did the Stanford Internet Observatory collapse? Was it because conservatives attacked it? How much of a struggle is it for a research group that specializes in monitoring disinformation to handle attacks? The word "amid" fudges the causal connection. Did X happen because of Y or did X and Y just happen around the same time?

The word "amid" also appears in the first sentence: "The Stanford Internet Observatory... has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation."

"Amid" appears again in the 4th paragraph: "Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda."

Have I ever gone on "amid" alert before? Yes! In October 2013, there was a NYT headline, "Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed." 

"Netanyahu 'peed on my leg,' Obama replied, according to two people familiar with the exchange..."

"... who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation. The moment [in 2014] was emblematic of a dynamic that is culminating in the bitter debates over Israel now erupting across the American political landscape. Over the past 16 years, Netanyahu has departed sharply from his predecessors’ studious bipartisanship to embrace Republicans and disdain Democrats, an attitude increasingly mirrored in each party’s approach to Israel...."

From "Netanyahu’s split with Biden and the Democrats was years in the making/The Israeli leader’s longtime strategy of aligning with the GOP has helped shatter the American consensus behind Israel" (WaPo).

Obama is doing something now, in saying that. Does it "move" anything "forward"? Is this, too, "complicit"?

I'm reading "Obama Urges Americans to Take in ‘Whole Truth’ of Israel-Gaza War/The former president said everyone was 'complicit to some degree' in the current bloodshed and acknowledged the points of view on both sides of the conflict." (NYT).

We're not given the full sentence with the phrase "complicit to some degree," just the phrase. It appears in the opening sentence to the article:

Barack Obama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between Israel and Gaza, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.

If we are "complicit," what did we do? What could we have done? But Obama, who was President, doesn't even know what he could have done:

“I look at this, and I think back, 'What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?' But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?'"

He's doing something now, in saying that. 

He goes on:

"Biden is the third U.S. president to visit Israel since 2013, and his visit is undeniably the most boring of them all."

"That’s not a criticism of Biden, however. In fact, the opposite is true – it’s a compliment. The uneventful and uncontroversial first day of his visit, which included fist bumps and handshakes at the airport, an exhibition of Israeli defense systems and a trip to Yad Vashem, represents a good kind of boring, which had been missing from the U.S.-Israel relationship under Biden’s two predecessors. When Donald Trump arrived in Israel in May 2017... [all the media] it had to do was place a camera in front of America’s erratic president... and let his unpredictable behavior and immature understanding of the world speak for themselves.... [Obama's] visit to Israel in 2013 was also great TV drama – a tense meeting between two rivals who had just spent the four years of Obama’s first term fighting each other over endless policy disagreements.... [Biden's visit] truly is a boring visit.... Israel is better off with a president who comes here for 48 hours, sees an Iron Dome battery, pledges to stop Iran from getting nukes, greets the American team at the Maccabiah games, and moves on to his next, more urgent challenges."

From "Biden's Boring First Day Was Just What Israel Needed/Look at Joe Biden’s visit and compare it to the previous two presidential landings. Drama? Tension? Politics? All are hard to find, but maybe that is actually good for Israel" by Amir Tibon (Haaretz).

"When you were asked, 'What's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,' you said 'Russia.' Not al Qaeda; you said Russia. And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

Said Barack Obama, in the third presidential debate in 2012, quoted by Chris Cillizza in "It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia" (CNN). 

So many people took the cue and laughed at Romney, who had been focusing attention on what Obama had said to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev earlier that year: "This is my last election. And after my election, I have more flexibility." 

Obama's joke — "the 1980s are now calling..." — overshadowed Romney's statement, which was: "Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage. And for this President to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn't have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia, is very, very troubling, very alarming." 

Now, Cillizza says: "What looked like a major flub during the 2012 campaign -- and was used as a political cudgel by Obama -- now looks very, very different. It should serve as a reminder that history is not written in the moment -- and that what something looks like in that moment is not a guarantee of what it will always look like."

How about telling us what you actually said at the time? Because you, Chris Cillizza, were part of the "political cudgel" that — passive voice — "was used." You had the ability at the time to be more than semi-conscious, and as a writer at The Washington Post, you had a responsibility to do more than cheer-lead for Obama, something more than glance "in the moment" and say "what something looks like." 

It was time at the time to say who was right and wrong! And here's what you said at the time:

 

Oh, the superciliousness of "methinks"! It looks so awful now — that supercillizziousness...

Here's The Week celebrating Obama and Cillizza's wit at the time:

4. The '80s called....

After Obama noted that, earlier this year, Romney had called Russia, not Al Qaeda, our greatest geopolitical threat, the president unleashed his other zinger of the night: "The 1980's are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back — because the Cold War has been over for 20 years. But governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s." Boom, "that '1980s called' line was the best line of the 3 debates methinks," tweeted The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza.

Yeah, "boom" yourself. I'm sure the zinger amused Putin.

"Just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), President Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize."

"The nomination submitted by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, lauded Trump for his efforts toward resolving protracted conflicts worldwide. 'For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,' Tybring-Gjedde, a four-term member of Parliament who also serves as chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told Fox News in an exclusive interview. Tybring-Gjedde, in his nomination letter to the Nobel Committee, said the Trump administration has played a key role in the establishment of relations between Israel and the UAE. 'As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity,' he wrote."

Fox News reports.

ADDED: What did Obama do to win the Nobel Peace Prize? He won in October 2009, less than 8 months after he became President. What the committee said was:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population....

He created a new climate!

AND: Meade, prescient in April 2018:

"Many presidents have used their foreign policy power for political or personal advantage. Most recently, President Barack Obama..."

"... misused his power in order to take personal revenge against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the last days of his second term, Obama engineered a one-sided UN Security Council resolution declaring that Israel's control over the Western Wall -- Judaism's holiest site -- constitutes a 'flagrant violation of international law.' Nearly every member of Congress and many in his own administration opposed this unilateral change in our policy, but Obama was determined to take revenge against Netanyahu, whom he despised. Obama committed a political sin by placing his personal pique over our national interest, but he did not commit an impeachable offense. Nor did President George H. W. Bush commit an impeachable offense when he pardoned Caspar Weinberger and others on the eve of their trials in order to prevent them from pointing the finger at him."

From "Impeachers Searching for New Crimes" by Alan Dershowitz (at Gatestone Institute).

AND: It would be great if we could just follow a sort of golden rule: Impeach a President you hate only if you would impeach a President you love for doing the same thing.

PLUS: I read my golden rule out loud to Meade and he said "Impeach unto others as you would have others impeach unto you."

"Dems hold Trump to double standard – What was OK for Obama isn’t OK for Trump."

Writes Andrew McCarthy (Fox News).

"Why did Obama go soft on Russia? My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran."

"Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision."

From "Mueller's report looks bad for Obama" by Scott Jennings.

That's at CNN, which tells us, "Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell... The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own" and directs us to "View more opinion articles on CNN." At that link, you can see how the "looks bad for Obama" story is balanced. Here's my screen capture:

f

"Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp."

"During the first gulf war, fought in part to protect the Saudis from an encroaching Saddam, a group of Saudi women — artists and academics — got excited by the presence of American female soldiers and went for a joy ride. The clerics branded the drivers 'whores' and 'harlots.' They received death threats and lost their jobs. Driving by women, banned by custom, was made illegal. America was mute. Our government did not even fight for the right of its women soldiers protecting Saudi Arabia to refuse the Saudi directive to wear an abaya and head scarf when off the base."

From "Step Away From the Orb" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"The Orb" refers to this:



That is our President, Donald J. Trump, and much of the column is, as you might expect, about him. I chose to highlight the "Even Hillary Clinton" part. There's also an "Even Barack Obama" part:

Even Barack Obama, who had no love lost for the Saudis, refused for eight years to release a classified document from 2002 detailing contacts between Saudi officials and some of the 9/11 hijackers, including checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and a connection between a Bandar employee and a Qaeda militant. (Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, wrote charitable checks that ended up in the hands of two hijackers.)

And there's a set of matching photos of Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush bowing their head to receive an idiotic medallion from a Saudi King. Dowd begins with a story about the time "a Saudi muck-a-muck" slid a velvet box of "expensive jewelry" across the table to her and, after she refused, attempted to hand it to her under the table.

ADDED: "During the first gulf war..." — odd not to capitalize "gulf." It's not as though "gulf" is a type of war (as in "trade war" or "war of nerves"). It's the Persian Gulf. If "Persian" were attached — and why isn't it? — the need for capitalization would be obvious. Elsewhere in the NYT archive I'm seeing either "Gulf War" or "Gulf war." I'll give this my "Althouse the pedant" tag, but I'm not just nit-picking. I'm noticing what is downplayed and wondering why.

"While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press..."

"... of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services. Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of 'Trump Incorporated' attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.... Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him."

Deep insight from the former CIA director John Brennan in "John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash/That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him." (NYT).

We were amused by the repeated use of the word "hogwash." Presumably, he's just backing off from the less fit to print "bullshit."

You may be interested to know that the first recorded use of "hogwash" in the figurative sense (as opposed to the literal stuff fed to hogs) was from Mark Twain:

1870 ‘M. Twain’ in Galaxy June 862/2 I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is ‘hogwash’.

Twain wasn't inventing the usage but reporting on it. Apparently, it came from California.

It's just a way to say "nonsense." The use of the word "bullshit" for nonsense only goes back to 1915, from Wyndom Lewis (writing to Ezra Pound). Apparently, "Bullshit" was a T.S. Eliot poem that never got published though it was an excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry (click image to enlarge and read and gain deep insight):

ADDED: Or did Eliot publish "Bullshit"? I'm seeing "The Triumph of Bullshit" and especially enjoyed the second verse:

Ladies, who find my intentions ridiculous
Awkward, insipid and horribly gauche
Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous
Dull as the heart of an unbaked brioche
Floundering versicles freely versiculous
Often attenuate, frequently crass
Attempts at emotion that turn isiculous,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Nice rhymes — horribly gauche with unbaked brioche and that whole ridiculous meticulous versiculous isiculous string.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade quotes the NYT byline for Brennan — "Mr. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017" — and says:

Coincidentally, immediately after his boss, Mr. Obama, gained more... "flexibility".

"7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year'" — a documentary about the last year of the Obama Administration.

I saw this tweet...

Ben Rhodes reacting to Hillary Clinton's hilarious defeat in 2016 is the funniest part of the new Obama Documentary on HBO.

What makes it even better is throughout the documentary he brags how she is going to win. pic.twitter.com/MGBQNE5ATY

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 30, 2018

... and it made me check out a bit of "The Final Year," but I thought it was such a bad documentary. They didn't seem to have any good footage of anything. Mostly shots of various people, e.g., Samantha Power, musing flatly in dull language. I amused myself briefly by testing out the theory that people were paraphrasing the stock line "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Anyway, I bailed out and went looking for some reviews and found "7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year,'" which expands the scope of the badness — the media's mediocrity on top of the filmmaker's.

I like this: "HBO's Dishonest Obama Documentary Is Fantasy Foreign Policy Puffery" (Reason).

In reality, it's less a documentary than a wet goodbye kiss to Obama, as well as a personal PR document for a few key members of his foreign-policy brain trust, employing that term loosely....

The Obama team repeatedly boasts that its three signature achievements are the Paris climate accord, the rapprochement with Cuba, and the Iran nuclear deal. But of how these agreements were reached, or who opposed them and why, there's not a word.

And even less is there an explanation of why, if they were so important, the Obama administration let them stand on a foundation of executive orders, rather than seeking congressional approval to make them law.

The consequence of that decision is that barely a year after he left office, practically nothing is left of what Obama policy-makers regarded as their most important works. ...

Those 2 words together like that.

White House affirms President Trump is in "Jerusalem, Israel." (Tillerson be damned.) pic.twitter.com/UaTng6uQuP

— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) May 22, 2017

Is it a big deal?

The Obama administration at least twice – in 2011 and then again last year – corrected photo captions and datelines that had read “Jerusalem, Israel” to “Jerusalem,” reflecting longstanding executive branch policy that the city should not be described as being in any country until there is a final status agreement. (Congress recognized the city as Israel’s capital in 1995.)

The George W. Bush administration also routinely captioned photos and listed the city on schedules and in news releases as simply “Jerusalem.”

As a candidate, Trump pledged to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, but since assuming the presidency he has retreated.

Maybe it was just — as with Obama — a mistake.

ADDED: In July 2012, when he was running for office, Mitt Romney said: “It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel."

That was a powerful statement, Jennifer Rubin writes, since the Obama administration has "repeatedly put out documents suggesting that Jerusalem isn’t in Israel and has attempted to scrub from the White House Web site the reference to Israel’s capital."

Trump reaching out to Duterte and Kim Jong-un — isn't it like what Obama said in the CNN/YouTube debate of July 2007?

Here's Obama, saying "the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them... is ridiculous":



Transcript:

And now for a headline with balls.

At The Hill: "Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped."

"Before the calls, we were advised to keep conversations short because, we were told, Trump will not be interested in the details of the call and does not have a long attention span..."

"... so it would be pointless to have a long call. However, we were pleasantly surprised at how much time President Trump spent asking very informed questions. The first time the presidents spoke, the questions Trump asked impressed us. 'How can you win in this fight [against terrorism]?' he asked. 'What do you need to become financially independent?' and 'How can American business invest in Afghanistan? How can we develop businesses and mining in your country?' Trump would listen intently after each question, often asking follow-ups. Trump's second call with our president was even longer than the first. Asking these types of questions for our country is something the Obama administration never did. The Obama administration was the most academic administration we have ever had to deal with but the Trump administration has been the most thoughtful and intelligent."

From "I Had Dinner With the Afghan Ambassador. What He Said About the Differences Between Trump, Obama Is Stunning" in Independent Business Review.

ADDED: Interesting to think about the contrast between "academic" and "thoughtful and intelligent." The ambassador seems to set them up almost as opposites.

"Nearly a decade and a half after the Iraq-WMD faceplant, the American press is again asked to co-sign a dubious intelligence assessment."

"Something About This Russia Story Stinks," writes Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

If the American security agencies had smoking-gun evidence that the Russians had an organized campaign to derail the U.S. presidential election and deliver the White House to Trump, then expelling a few dozen diplomats after the election seems like an oddly weak and ill-timed response. Voices in both parties are saying this now....

It appears that a large segment of the press is biting hard on the core allegations of electoral interference emanating from the Obama administration. Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. Plowing ahead with credulous accounts is problematic because so many different feasible scenarios are in play.

On one end of the spectrum, America could have just been the victim of a virtual coup d'etat engineered by a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which would be among the most serious things to ever happen to our democracy. But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.

The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence "assessment" to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation: Does he ease up on Russia and look like a patsy, or escalate even further with a nuclear-armed power?