Lt. Col. Ralph Peters blasted White House aide Ben Rhodes Monday, insisting that dictator Joseph Stalin could have used a "chief propagandist" like him when he was in power.
Peters was responding to a New York Times profile where, among other revelations, Rhodes boasted about using reporters and creating an "echo chamber" of Obama-friendly experts to sell the Iran nuclear deal.
Fox Business host Stuart Varney read out Rhodes' Medium column posted Sunday where the Obama flack reversed course and said there was "no shortage of good reporting and analysis." However, Varney pointed out, Rhodes "still misled" these people.
He asked Peters, a fierce critic of the Obama administration's foreign policy, for his take.
"Well, let's start with Ben Rhodes' title," Peters said. "It's Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications. In other words, Chief Propagandist. And as a propagandist, he's been very, very good. I mean, Joseph Stalin could have used this guy. But, really, if you look at what he said, he not only insulted journalists, just trashed them, he insulted the foreign policy community, the military, virtually everyone.
"Ben Rhodes was gleeful, gleeful in this brilliantly done article about how they put one over on the American people through manipulating journalists through this myth that they were only negotiating now with the Iranians because suddenly there were moderates in place when they'd been negotiating with the hard-liners for years before that. Then Ben Rhodes throws out the trope that, ‘Well, you know, if you don't like this nuke deal, the only alternative is war.’ And that was nonsense."
Peters later referred to Rhodes as being "just a wordsmith."