Not a good sign
Posted by Richard on November 7, 2008
The pundits, including many conservative pundits, are opining that Obama will "govern from the center." Sure he will. That's why he picked a hard-core leftist, rabidly partisan pit bull, Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, as his chief of staff.
Emmanuel made it quite clear after the 2006 election how interested he is in reaching across the aisle and ending the partisanship in Washington: "The Republicans can go fuck themselves!"
I suspect a number of blue-blood country-club Republican politicians will be only too eager to go fuck themselves in order to demonstrate how bipartisan and cooperative they can be.
Oh, yeah — Emmanuel was on the board of Freddie Mac when it was creating our current financial crisis, and he helped Steny Hoyer manipulate the Congressional bailout plan voting so as to maximize the PR damage to the Republicans. (HT: Sweetness & Light)
mark said
That was really a good post. So many conservative blogs suck– glad to see there’s some good ones out there.
David Aitken said
Richard is a libertarian, maybe even a Libertarian. I pretty sure he finds the drug war repugnant, government involvement in marriage abominable, and McCain-Feingold a disaster, to name a few left-wing issues. I doubt if most conservatives hold those views. Check out the World’s Smallest Political Quiz at http://www.theadvocates.org and tell us how you scored.
rgcombs said
Thanks, Mark, I appreciate that. And thanks, David, for summarizing where I’m coming from so succinctly.
Yes, I’m still a capital-L Libertarian. I’ve been a registered Libertarian since I moved to Colorado in 1983 and could do so, and I’m a Life Member of the party. I’ve been tempted to re-register Republican a few times to vote in primaries, but I’ve always resisted the temptation.
OTOH, I voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain (while holding my nose and thinking of Sarah Palin) this year.
I utterly reject the blame-America, isolationist, head-in-the-sand response of most Libertarians (and practically all of the left) to the fact that a global Islamofascist movement is waging war on the U.S. in particular and Western Civilization in general.
I’m hoping that the collapse of the GOP in the last two elections and the inevitable failure of Obama’s leftist economic policies will, like the Jimmy Carter presidency, lead to a new resurgence of small-government libertarian/conservative Republicanism.
Thanks for stopping by!
rgcombs said
BTW, the one good thing I’ve heard about Emmanuel is that he’s a strong supporter of Israel. Mark, one of your commenters said he has dual Israeli citizenship; I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, I see it as a potentially good sign regarding the war.
And it must be freaking out all those Arabs who illegally donated to the Obama campaign. 🙂