This makes sense why the White House fumbled the Bergdahl prisoner swap so badly.
And this is precisely the problem. President Obama felt “very
strongly” that he had made the right decision — and nobody who worked
for him was about to tell him otherwise. “There was not a dissent on
moving forward with this plan,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, told Time magazine.
In other words the Obama White House and the "Sun King" Louis XIV court are starting to resemble one another. A team of yes-men that can't tell the monarch any bad news at all. This article goes on to suppose that congress wasn't called about the prisoner deal because they might tell Obama some bad news. I can see someone like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the intelligence committee chairman saying "Bergdahl might be a defector so it would be stupid to trade 5 Taliban Generals for him."
The White House then does a Rose Garden victory lap and then has to make a tortured explanation why the Bergdahls where there in the first place. I'm sure someone could have said "wait on the victory lap" until we can at least call Dianne Feinstein or can talk to Bergdahl to see if he is a defector or merely a deserter.
Finally, having Susan Rice go on the morning shows (which was such a good idea during the Bengazi debacle) and say Bergdahl served with honor and distinction was a total unforced error. This seemed to bring out the soldiers who Bergdahl abandoned to tell the real story on what happened. If the White House kept their mouth shut maybe the story of why Bergdahl fell into the Taliban's hands would have remained a mystery. In any case "Sun King" Obama might want to leave the Court every now and then and hear some unvarnished truth if he can take it.
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