Spring Break
Obama staff picks inspire little hope
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 1/16/09 Section: Ed-Op
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Still, he did ask for it, and it's his country now. He hasn't done anything with it yet, but it's not too early to read the signs, and they are not reassuring. The last thing we need is continuity with the criminal regime now leaving office and its none-too-superior predecessors. Yet the first thing Obama did upon his election was to ask Robert Gates to stay on as secretary of defense, and give his thumping endorsement to David Petraeus and the other military perpetrators of the Iraqi and Afghan disasters. This is the same Gates who, after putting his John Hancock on the Iraq Study Group Report that called for withdrawal from Iraq, went to work fronting the Bush surge that - falsely credited with reductions in the violence there - merely added another year to the misery of that unhappy land.
Now, it might be argued that Gates took this assignment to forestall the crazies in Dick Cheney's chop shop from invading Iran. You might want to give him a pass on that basis, although the story has yet to be told. But Gates is also a vigorous proponent of the major new military buildup Obama has embraced, which is designed to increase our capacity to play bully in the world. It should also be noted that his civilian second at Defense will be a former lobbyist, and that the deputy national security adviser will be John Brennan, whose name was withdrawn from consideration for a post requiring Senate confirmation because of his waffling on Bush's torture policies. And then there's Steve Kappes, who'll stay as number two at the CIA despite having had direct oversight of its torture practices.
How's that for a fresh start?
Continuing to extend the olive branch to the thoroughly trounced and discredited Republicans, Obama now wants to let alone Bush's unconscionable tax cuts for the wealthy until their 2010 expiration, and to offer new ones in the form of so-called business credits for hiring workers. Memo to Barack: if Franklin D. Roosevelt had listened to Republican nostrums for ending the Great Depression, we'd still be in it. It's not as if our divine right billionaires were hurting along with the rest of us, either: Henry Paulson, in the Bush regime's final Santa act for the rich, has already forked over $350 billion to superbanks and investment houses.
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