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Wednesday, Nov 4, 2009
For this left-leaning Obama supporter Joan got it doubly wrong. The handwringing over Lieberman was silly; I predicted and hoped to my circle Obama would publicly call for Lieberman not to be punished and Im glad he did. The reason? Getting to 60 votes for cloture when needed. I hope that Lieberman has been given the message that he must support the president on cloture votes, and I suspect he will. Hillary on the other hand is a bridge too far or, to be more precise a "rival" too many. Knowledgeable foreign policy observers know that Hillary Clinton's Iraq vote was no accident as the Clinton policy toward Iraq led inevitably to the disastrous invasion and indeed matched the neocons in their messianic arrogance, if not their militarism.
Hillary Clinton not only has no real foreign policy experience, she has no foreign policy vision, having merely absorbed the tired blinkers of her party's hawks, heirs to the Cold War Democrats who landed us in the Vietnam mess, and today are uncritically supportive of Israel, pushing to back Russia into a corner, and conceived the dangerous myth of the "rogue state." What is worse, the Secretary of State's job is a job for a manager, more than a strategist and the one thing we know about Hillary is that she is no manager. If Obama is able to find others to do these jobs she may be a good "diplomat in chief" but that, ironically, will call on the skills she demonstrated most effectively traveling abroad as first lady, with no policy role.
As for Bill, I think the Obama administration would suffer far greater embarrassment than being spurned by the lady if it transpires that her husband's many shady clients give even the hint of conflict of interest to her actions. I know that the Walshes of this world have a hard time accepting that Clinton is as ethically challenged as the world knows him to be, but the rest of us can only pray that she turns it down.
If the Democrats had over 60 votes in the Senate, they would be able to throw Lieberman under a bus.
The only way they would side-step the ugly situation with Leiberman is to decide to eliminate or modify the filibuster, and that's something they just won't do.
It is tough-tough-tough to argue with the constituents who reelected him as an independent. I think they made a mistake, but I don't vote in that state, so...
"Any right thinking person will conclude that Andrea Mitchel will not throw away her future sources with Obama's team by falsely accusing them of leaking such a sensitive material about Hillary."
I see. And if I don't agree with you "right-thinking people", I'm guilty of "hatred".
Oh, yes. I see it all so clearly now that you've explained it to me.
She burns nothing with the Obama people if she doesn't bloody name them. There must be a hundred people in the president-elect's camp who knew about the offer. Every one of them can suspect that it was Hillary's people leaking through a trained monkey of a reporter, but they can't know it.
Tell me you don't think our very own Joan Walsh would happily perform this service for the Clintons.
I'm not saying this is horrific evil on the part of the Clintons. It's just a preview of the drama that's waiting for Obama for making the totally foolish choice to invite Hillary to take the spotlight at every opportunity, and run a separate presidency from the State Department. It will be a gigantic headache for him, if nothing else.
Like I said, it's just a big disappointment. Hillary is also a singularly poor choice to fix Iraq, since she and her husband kept brutal sanctions in place against that poor, helpless country for 8 years after they'd destroyed all their WMD. On the same false grounds that Bush invaded on.
BTW, do you remember that Hillary supported that war completely, and cheerled Bush's invasion?
Think she'll have the chance to obliterate Iran? Would she be the best person possible to talk to Iran after threatening them with extermination?
I hear you that you were not trying to be sarcastic. Some liberals do not even believe that we have a right to be concerned over the cabinet Obama picks.
Your views on social programs for the poor need some freshening up. Welfare and low income housing are not adequate at all. Schools in poor neighborhoods are crumbling and being poor does not get one free tuition to Harvard. Finally, abortion rights are not protected by the 14th Amendment, but the 4th Amendment. As for states deciding the matter, states are allowed to decide the terms of marriage, but the Supreme Court bans any state from banning interracial marriage, for example. Why? Because no matter how much discretion has over an issue, the state can only expand the rights you have under the Constitution, not contract them. So long as there exists a 4th Amendment protection for abortion, the states can only regulate it within that framework. That is all I will say about that because it is off topic.
I would like to know why you and the Republican base like Sarah Palin so much. She is uneducated. She is unintelligent. She is uninformed. She does not read any periodicals. She knows nothing about the legislative history of our country. She does not know more than one major Supreme Court decision. She is a race baiter. She does not know about autism and how it relates to specific genes or neurotoxins, despite claiming to be an expert. She speaks in word salads rather than full coherent sentences. She is not intellectually curious. You can tell that until she was nominated, she never thought about big world issues before and it is pretty clear that she was unable to wrap her head around them after she was nominated. She does not know the constitutional duties or powers of the vice-president. The worst part of it all was that she was proud of being ignorant and uninformed. And, her audiences seemed to love her for being an uneducated dummy. She was willing to put herself a heartbeat away from the presidency despite being totally unprepared for office. She put her ambition first, not her country.
Despite all of this, John McCain nominated her because he had to give a nod to the Republican base. He could not pick someone qualified like Mitt Romney or someone utterly unqualified but more to his tastes like Joe Lieberman because the base would never have accepted them. He had to pick a right-wing ignoramus. When the Democrats nominate someone, they give a nod to the Republican base too. Democrats never consider the reaction of their base when they vote on things or nominate candidates. This Lieberman business and cabinet appointments are just another example of that.
It is pretty naive to think that Obama will be able to totally control what the members of his cabinet do. Cabinet members are charged with carrying out the president's will, but they can run a shadow government if the Congress, leaders abroad, or leaders in a certain industry take the that person more seriously than they do the president. Cabinet members can undermine a president's credibility by their own bad behavior too. It is true that a president can fire a cabinet member, but he cannot do it every time there is a scandal or a misstep because it makes him look like he is a bad decision maker for choosing that person or he is wishy washy for heeding the calls of the media, one of the political parties, interest groups, or Congress. Obama is a savvy politician, but he has yet to prove himself a savvy governor. Many people point to how he ran his campaign as a sign of how well he will govern. That is totally off base. Obama had total control over his campaign, but he does not have control over Congress, the courts, and to some extent his cabinet. Obama never bothered to learn about the unique institution that is the US Congress because he was concerned with running for president. Because the Senate decided to reward Joe Lieberman, he has set the stage for unruliness within the party. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have no control over the Democrats in Congress and when Obama proposes legislation and Pelosi puts it before the House, he better hope it is something everyone can agree on. Pelosi could not even pull votes together on the bailout despite saying that she could and despite the de facto leader of the party (Obama) saying he supported it. Obama could not even reign in the CBC. Why? Because the bailout was controversial and the Democrats did not care about embarrassing the party leadership. That would never have happened to Tip O'Neil or Newt Gingrich because they had their parties in line.
Obama is going to have problems dealing with people who are not groupies. He may have cheering crowds in Europe and other countries, but the US's power is diminished, we are in serious debt, the economy is in crisis, we have a crisis in civil liberties, and he is going to be in over his head. He can talk about a team of rivals all he wants, but he does not need to have to worry about refereeing them and the world and unforeseen world events.
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