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After the Future

Sideshow

All this nonsense about teabagging and the antics of wingnuttiana is a sideshow.  We should be asking about what's going on in the Obama DOJ.  Every time you look around,…

All this nonsense about teabagging and the antics of wingnuttiana is a sideshow.  We should be asking about what's going on in the Obama DOJ.  Every time you look around, we learn something disturbing. The crazy right we shall have always with us, but our hope for the future lies in rolling back the Bush doctrine concerning how the executive is above the law, and Obama doesn't seem to want to do that.  It is also disturbing that Holder is unwilling to review the Siegelman case. It raises a very important question:  Whose side are these guys on?  I mean really.

I know, there are things we don't know, and it's complicated, and there may be good reasons, but where's the good news?  The pattern that is forming here is confirming my worst fears about how it's too late.

Comments

3 responses

  1. valerius Avatar
    valerius

    I think you should start ditching your idea about how Obama is internally motivated for noble action but that external circumstance is preventing it. He’s just your typical politician. He knows that going after the Bush administration will hurt him in the polls. After all, what else is stopping him from initiating investigations? Again, another typical politician–if Bill Clinton were president right now, I can’t really see him doing anything different from Obama.
    Also, do you happen to know what Obama’s plan is to regulate Wall Street? The only thing I’ve read about is their plan for creating a public-private partnership to remove ‘toxic’ assets from bank financial statements. Anything about monopolies or investment regulations?

    Reply
  2. jack Whelan Avatar
    jack Whelan

    I’m not quite there yet, but it’s looking more and more that that’s the case. But the bottom line is not the personalities who play their roles, but the nature of the system of entrenched power Bill or Hillary or Obama or anybody in the political class serves.
    It’s still a question for me to what degree Obama is willing servant of this system or someone who wants to change the rules. It’s looking more likely that he is a willing servant, but with the Clintons there was never a question in my mind that they were anything else. If there’s no hope for real change with Obama, there’s no hope.
    At least with Obama there was the possibility he would bring something different, even if in the end to have thought so will be proved wrong. And there’s some hope yet that he can be pushed to do the right thing. The question is whether those who would push him can get motivated and organized enough to do it.

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  3. Matt Zemek Avatar
    Matt Zemek

    The issue I raised with my rose-colored-glass-wearing family members during the transition remains, for me, the salient issue now and always:
    The people with the most expertise and/or familiarity with various governmental systems, those who are old hands at pulling the levers of power, are also the ones with the most accumulated baggage. Any experienced Washington player, in just about any realm of governmental operations, is an appreciably tainted, compromised, and co-opted figure.
    In Treasury, State, the CIA, and numerous other departments/positions/agencies, the pool of widely-considered candidates simply didn’t include many, if any, genuine outside-the-system prospects. One of the very few unusual choices for Obama’s cabinet was Hilda Solis at Labor, but even then, her husband had some sort of issue with taxes.
    The real lesson of American power, at least to the extent I’ve been able to absorb it over the past five months of transition and early governance in the Obama Administration, is that a leader (president) needs to choose independent-minded people without institutional taint, and be willing to suffer the slings and arrows of Beltway criticism.
    People should shape policies in an enlightened governmental model, but today, we simply have too many examples of policies (and powerlust, and greed, and ideology) shaping people instead.
    I never saw Obama as “the anointed solution/answer to all our problems” the way so many other fawning progressives did. Nevertheless, I do think that Obama’s power motivations aren’t nearly as crass or crude as many of his predecessors (or his congressional contemporaries). The great weakness Obama has yet to realize in his performance is that he has surrounded himself with far too many compromised people, which therefore makes it virtually impossible for him to hear enough sensible (and integrity-laden) voices for him to see through the fog and make the right decision in the end. The CIA is a perfect example, with the guts and innards of the organization still being staffed by those who presided over Bush-era atrocities and offenses.

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