Think about it: From a humanitarian perspective, the devastation resulting from the effort to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb may have already exceeded the devastation that would result from Iran actually dropping a nuclear bomb.

That's what Jeffery Goldberg says in his Atlantic profile on Obama.

But I'm reading that quoted in The Mind of the President by David Hazony at the Tower. Hazony is using the Goldberg profile along with the NYT profile by David Samuels to produce his own analysis. And it is quite good. And long. Good Sunday reading.

The best part is, it's all familiar. But with clarifying tidbits like Obama's entire Cabinet is basically a smokescreen. Never has an administration's Cabinet been so useless. They are the signal to the world that everything is business as usual. Another is that Samantha Powers is highly regarded based on her work. She is genuine expert and provided Obama a plan for Syria all in line with her area of expertise and all that Obama rejected to persist with his vision of how things must be, his conceptualization of U.S. power as only entangling draining unhelpful interference. "I know. I read your book, Samantha." Obama is reported to have dismissed. She gets promoted for putting up with that.

Hazony has some great observations. It's good reading. Kate at Small Dead Animals says, "Grab a coffee" and quotes Hazony describing the two interviews:

-have revealed a kaleidoscope of mendacity so sophisticated, creative, consuming, and substantively boundless as to give rise to a sense that something essential has changed in the relationship between truth and falsehood, between the actual policies of an administration and its efforts to sell them.

Hazony's subheadings:

I. Spin is the Opposite of Policy
II. Getting Out
III. The Wrong Side of History
IV. It Must Be Hard to Know Everything
V. The President’s Power Problem
VI. The Disaster Has Already Happened
VII. The Phony War
VIII. The Next Ex-President