Yes! That is what I hope.

Reality is going to be increasingly hard to ignore. Obama is by all accounts a smart person who wishes to succeed, so I'm pinning my hopes on his willingness to change tacks. I think the Obama presidency can have one of 3 outcomes:

• His appointments really do work out, his critics eat crow, but are pleased with the positive outcome.
• His appointments don't work out, but he's smart enough to learn from his mistakes and listens to criticism. He tacks in time to make his first term a success.
• His appointments don't work out, but he displays G. W. Bush-like pigheadedness and his administration is a disaster.

I think the second outcome is the most likely. Therefore, despite my criticisms, I remain hopeful.

This process of declaring incoming Cabinets to be composed of adults reminds me of the way drug companies market new drugs by manipulating FDA labeling requirements. Prozac is a famous case.

Step 1: Develop a new drug

Step 2: Market it with the claim that it has no side effects

Step 3: Deny all rumors of side effects as long as you hold the patent (which expires after a fixed period)

Step 4: Develop a new drug identical to the old one except for a few meaningless molecular differences

Step 5: Claim that, unlike the old drug, the new drug has no side effects; label the old drug with dozens of scary side effects and dump it in Africa and Asia

This is how the media markets each president's Cabinet. Substitute "Cabinet" for "drug" and "the private sector" for "Africa and Asia," and allow discredited "adults" to return once they have spent a cycle making a killing (or destroying businesses) in the private sector, and the resemblance is remarkable.

As a member firmly sitting with the STFU crowd (and isn't that what Ari Fleischer and Co. told us when Bush was in charge and we criticized his actions?), I will believe that Obama's old guard will change how Washington works (and change the country as a result) only once I see it and not a second before.

It's at least within the realm of possibility

that Obama is working his master plan to win the good graces of all Washington by keeping his liberal tendencies below the surface somewhat. Once firmly a crowd fav he can break out his more progressive ideas, and his inertia and crowd pleasing status will make today's ridiculed librul ideas suddenly palatable to the masses.

You been reading God Emperor of Dune again, muntaba? Is Obama going to grow scales and a 300-foot body?

Let the spice flow.

Obama is a crypto-Blengin.

If anyone herein gets this reference my faith in humanity will be restored.

Obscure indeed, sir. My hat sweeps the ground.

the constant harping on it and carping about it.

The Iran-Contra pardons are most definitely far more consequential as many of the people involved have gone on to do immense damage to the United States and its government. Whereas Marc Rich has not.

Gee, what's more important?

Hysteria over Marc Rich's pardon was and is the product of anti-Clintonism. Period.

To try to use it against Eric Holder ought to be absurd. There are more important things he has said and done than grease the wheels for Rich's pardon. But those other things he's said and done -- re: Guantanamo, and the whole lawless regime it represents -- have a constituency and the Marc Rich pardon does not. The focus in opposing Holder, therefore, is on the constitutency-free Rich affair, not on the substantive issues of lawless government.

On the other hand, apart from its Pavlovian trigger effect among the anti-Clintonists, Marc Rich is utterly meaningless to most Americans.

Oppose or support Holder, for any reason or no reason, by all means.

But there have been far, far more consequential uses of the pardon power (not "abuses") in recent history than this one.

If Hillary Clinton was the president-elect and she chose the same slate of appointees Obama just did (which she might very well have done), there'd be none of this "wait-and-see" honeymoon business for her. The progressive left would be trashing her with all the joy of Rush Limbaugh on a drug bender.

I cannot help but think these appointments are to help him REDIFNE his rhetoric into a "prgamatic" policy and implmentation. Obama IS inexperienced. So, he goes looks for others with more experience to surround himself with. At face value, that part is not surprising.

However, the question of whether he will be the influencer, or the influenced, is very much an open question. First impressions will say he will be influenced, but impressions can certainly be changed by actions.

The only real and effective reformer who came from the inside in the last 100 years was Teddy Rooseveldt. Do you think Obama will be another Rooseveldt, either one of them? I just don't see from his history or his rhetoric that he will "rise up" when he takes the big chair. I would very much liked to be proved wrong.

Was it because Mrs. gave a huge donation to the Clinton Slush Fund, no Clinton Library?

Then, lo and behold, one of the biggest and most brazen tax cheats in our history was miraculously pardoned?

Was this just one example of the mountains of sleaze which characterized Billy Jeff's Presidency?

I'm sorry not to be the one to restore your faith in humanity. All I can say, re: muntaba it's at least within the realm of possibility that Obama is working his master plan... (and Baldie's response) is:

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

This was heard repeated at a recent cabinet-elect meeting.

And Bush was recently heard muttering, before a press conference,

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

I will face my fear.

I will let it pass through me.

When the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.