‘The Final Year’ film exposes Obama team and their foreign policy naivety

How about a film review for a sleepy Saturday on a holiday weekend? I had heard that this documentary was in the works months ago. That being following around the Obama team the last year of his administration. Apparently it is about to hit HBO, however there has been a limited screen showing. I read they cover Samantha Power and her coming to terms with their loss. I for one am looking forward to it. I’ll throw in a couple of clips. Ben Rhodes is a laugher.

Quoting Weasel Zippers: This is by turns hilarious, yet also incredibly sad to think that this is the flummoxed administration we were saddled with for 8 years.

Free Beacon:

Ben Rhodes sputters incoherently at the end of “The Final Year,” the documentary about former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team and their diplomatic efforts throughout 2016.

He’s rendered speechless by an event he says wasn’t going to happen during the film: The election of Donald Trump.

Yet throughout the documentary, he’s also flummoxed by finding out Vladimir Putin isn’t out to promote what the U.S. thinks Russia’s interests are, the media’s response to his pronouncement that they were stupid rubes suckered into promoting the Iran nuclear deal, people who think climate change isn’t a bigger threat than Islamic terrorism, and at one point, getting into the back seat of a van.

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Quoting the New York Post

In a moment of woeful irony in the Obama-administration documentary “The Final Year,” UN Ambassador Samantha Power travels to Cameroon to offer photo-op comfort to families terrorized by Boko Haram — only to have her motorcade kill a 7-year-old boy.

Greg Barker, the director of this fan film, does his best to downplay the accident: It is discussed while we watch a clip of Power’s convoy moving at a crawl when in fact it was reportedly traveling at over 60 miles an hour when it struck the boy.

But to understand why Rhodes and Obama are so pleased with their foreign policy, you have to understand the way they think. The documentary is revealing about that.

Naïvety, meet arrogance. These were the guiding forces behind the Rhodes-Obama foreign policy. The arrogance came in thinking that all previous administrations were too thick to come up with this awesome idea Rhodes had: Military force is bad.

Snip…

….but it’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes who has the most amusing reaction to Donald Trump’s victory.

Asked whether a Trump administration might endanger his accomplishments, he says, “I’ve never really considered that.” So what does the speechwriter and former aspiring novelist have to say when Trump wins? “I mean, uh, I can’t even [long pause] I can’t, I ca - - [long pause] I mean I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t put it into words. I don’t know what the words are.”

THE FINAL YEAR Trailer #1 NEW (2018) Barack Obama Documentary Movie