Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, July 12, 2013

Deal Breaker

I have been - in the parlance of the Firebaggers - an Obot.  I have been very forgiving of Obama's failings, because I see most of them as structural.  Obama failed to get the public option and a bigger stimulus because the votes were not there.  Obama failed to close Gitmo because the Senate wet its collective bed.  Obama has not ended the expansion of the security state, because the security state expands under its own gravitational pull.  Obama has not taken action on cap-and-trade because the votes....blah blah blah.

I do fault him for giving too much leeway to the national security apparatus at times - in Afghanistan and the NSA.  I do fault him for his debt ceiling fiasco and the general assumption that perhaps the modern GOP is NOT full of nihilists.

But I have operated under the impression that Obama (unlike Clinton post-'94) has done the best he could under a system that makes progressive change hard.

But if he nominates Joe Lieberman as Secretary of Homeland Security, that's a deal breaker.

UPDATE: Right on cue!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/12/who-will-be-the-next-homeland-security-secretary/

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