Asinine. Speaking as a “little guy”, I want Obama to select the very best people for the job, which means people who have the know-how and the where-with-all to carry out his vision. Like Janet Naplitano, for example, whose schooling was in Santa Clara and Virgina.
Sarah Palin is a fucking idiot, and it has nothing to do with what school she attended. She is a bullshitter who gets by on charm and tits. The crowds who wait in line to see her are equally bereft of intellect, and are, in the main, bigots and racists, as a visit to YouTube will show.
There’s a difference between someone who attends Ivy League on a family legacy and then goes off to make a fortune, and someone who attends on merit and then goes off to change lives. Barack Obama knows the plight of struggling people because he gave his life over to them and lived among them, and in fact struggled a good bit himself. The only thing more socially cursed in this society than being black in the ghetto is being half-black in Kansas.
He is a new kind of leader for the Democrats, and many of them even don’t yet understand who he is or what they have. The far left will turn on him before the right does. The left is as bigotted as the right, only in reverse. They assumed that having a black man would mean the fulfillment of all their weirdo left-wing nut dreams. It’s as though they didn’t even listen during his campaign. Obama is more libertarian than left, both fiscally and socially. That’s why I’ve supported him from the beginning.
And one more thing. Obama isn’t interested in the most clever or most intelligent solutions. He’s interested in solutions that work. He isn’t appointing people to figure out a vision. The vision is already his, and he’s doing what needs to be done to make his vision realized.
> The only thing more socially cursed in this society than being black in the ghetto
> is being half-black in Kansas.
Obama never lived in Kansas. He probably spent almost no time there even as a child, despite his mother being born there. It’s hard to tell if he even knew any of his mother’s family who still lived in Kansas. His mother only lived in Kansas for a few years as a child. Her parents left Kansas and moved around the U.S. several times. She graduated from high school in the state of Washington. She and her parents moved just as she graduated because her father got a new job in Hawaii, so she enrolled at the University of Hawaii. Neither she nor her parents ever lived in Kansas again. Obama has no more connection with Kansas than he does with Kenya. He hardly knew his father and only knows Kenya from a couple of visits there, and he may have never visited Kansas. If you’re going to talk about Obama’s experiences, talk about Hawaii, Indonesia, California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, where he actually lived.
> Obama is more libertarian than left, both fiscally and socially.
I’m afraid I’m going to need cites for this as well - nearly all of his campaign rhetoric and his website platform seemed to be garden variety liberalism.
There is a strange tendency for Obama fans to see their policy preferences in him - easy to have happen, as Obama himself can be vague at times. It seems at first glance that Liberal has fallen into this trap.
It happened before with him - he insisted in previous threads that Obama was a principled Second Amendment supporter despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
As a wise person somewhere said, “I don’t want to sit down and have a beer with the president. I want him to be a LOT smarter than me and I want him to run the fucking country.”
Since nearly 80% ot the public approves of Mr Obama’s transition efforts, and since this is an extraordinarily high rating Poll: 79% approve of way Obama is handling transition - CNN.com it’s dumb to extrapolate from a minority opinion that “American’s (sic) are too dumb for an Obama presidency.”
Of course, half of all Americans have IQ’s under 100, so the approval rating doesn’t signify intelligence, either.
Whenever conservatives whine about the “intelligentsia” it reminds of the dumb kids who sat in the back of the class who could not get peer approval for success, so they high-fived each other when they got Fs and made fun of the nerds.
No. What we CAN agree on is the mere fact of going to Yale or Harvard (or other Ivy league schools) shouldn’t disqualify you from a position requiring great intelligence just because…you have a great intelligence.
But merely going to the school does not, by default, make you intelligent or qualified to be in a cabinet position.
I really can’t believe we’re having this conversation.
If you honestly believe that this is a useful contribution to the discussion, you’re dumber than a warehouse full of rocks. I suspect you don’t, and that you’re just trying to get a rise out of the liberals.
“I don’t want the president to be a regular guy, I want him to be embarrassingly superior! Like this guy!” [pic appears of one of the huge-headed Talosians from the Star Trek pilot “The Menagerie”] “Mr. President, there is trouble in the Middle East!” [scrunches up eyes and makes humming noise] “It is done.”
Congratulations Shodan! With this post, you have locked up the award for “Missing the fucking point completely”! The judges cited your persistence and your tenuous grasp of reality as “really standing out in a class by themselves”
Your point is not really pertinent to this discussion. Regardless of which president took which action, the phrase “the best and the brightest” refers to the book by David Halberstam of the same title, taken from an earlier, ironic description by Halberstam of the staff that Kennedy assembled who made enormous errors in judgement regarding the goals and the methods employed in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Johnson retained the majority of Kennedy’s staff in the early days of his presidency–corresponding to the time when the war was ramped up and the policies of the next seven years established.
Perhaps the Obama transition is going better than that of, for instance, the Bush one because Obama isn’t dealing with people who are so spitefully petty that they trash the White House on their way out.
I realize this is probably only in jest, but I’m pretty sure the presidency is already way more than sufficiently imperial. When “The People” expect the president to wave a hand and state, “It is done,” and Congress has so thoroughly abdicated its own leadership responsibilities as this one has done, the danger of an imperial presidency should be quite obvious. It leads to exactly the abuses of constitutionally delegated powers and curtailing of freedoms that we’ve seen in the current administration. The overwhelmingly positive response from “The People” to the incoming Obama administations actions leads me to believe we’re likely to head yet farther down this dangerous pass.
It’s doubly ironic because Kennedy got the nomination in the first place by disparaging Stevenson, who Bobby Kennedy especially denigrated as an effeminate and ineffective intellectual. The more liberal wing of the Democratic Party was pressing for Stevenson to be appointed Secretary of State after the election - the Kennedys offered him instead the UN ambassadorship, not seen then as a plum administration job.
Your timing is off there little buddy. Obama has not yet gotten into the White House.
As for your “trashing the whitehouse” meme:
The cites I can find all list $13,000 - $14,000 as the total cost of getting the White House into shape for Bush II. This includes replacing keyboards (the infamous “W Key” episode), and routine cleaning (which is always done as a matter of course).
Naturally, the partisan investigation into this “trashiing” cost much more than that. If Bush’s transition was thrown off by a minor annoyance, it speaks volumes for his teams inability to function.
But then you’re not particularly interested in the facts, are you Shodan?
I guess I’ll try to be more Shodanesque then:
“So you’re saying that Bush’s transition team was unable to appoint capable people to cabinet in December of 2000 because someone was going to remove the “W” keys from the whitehouse keyboards at some later date?”