Reprises of evasions and obfuscations of the past

In National Review, James Rosen writes about a book written by Ben Rhodes, the man in the Obama White House

charged with overseeing all communications relating to foreign policy and national security.

The book is entitled,

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. Rhodes’s recollection is smart and funny, poignant and biting, anxious and depressed: the richest firsthand account of Obama the man yet in print, an early landmark in the historical literature of his presidency. Having previously earned an MFA from New York University, Rhodes sketches the men and women who surrounded Obama, at home and on the world stage, with a novelist’s eye for physical de­scription and comic detail.

…Yet however successful Rhodes’s book is as literature, it cannot be taken at face value as history. The World as It hardly presents the truth as it is, or as it was during the events depicted; as in all political memoirs, the primary objective is a mix of vindication and absolution. Readers who followed the news in the Obama era will accordingly recognize the themes and elaborations in these pages as rehashes of familiar talking points, the elisions and omissions as reprises of evasions and obfuscations past.

…The fragility of reality emerges as a central theme. Rhodes writes often of the “intangible” ways in which things occur, or in which he perceives them (“the one thing I never lost faith in was the confidence that I was part of something that was right in some intangible way”). Invariably he sees a duality in politics and truth, a chasm between U.S. opinion and foreign sentiment; “absurd,” “absurdity,” and “absurdities” arise on practically every other page.

Read more here.