Jane Hamsher catches Obama deputy Steve Hildebrand telling liberals to stop questioning BO's Cabinet choices. (Via Avedon Carol)
Steve, of course, has the sentence wrong. What Obama and his people need to remember - for a change - is that BO was elected by us to be president of all the people, not just those on the Right. We have been consistently more correct about the negative effects of conservative policies than either the Center or the Right-wing Washington establishment, let alone the far-Right whacko neocons who've had things their own way for almost a decade. We don't propose to be shuffled aside like obstreperous children by a president we elected just to see the same people we've been accurately critical of put back in place so they can continue the disruptive, unworkable policies that landed us in the soup in the first place.
Somebody needs to explain to Steve that if he's telling his own people they're not allowed to voice concerns about anything BO does, he ain't no fucking liberal. Liberals listen and then work things out. They DON'T say "My way or the highway", and they DON'T run political parties as if they were military units getting their marching orders from which there had better be no deviation or the guardhouse awaits. Conservatives do that. A lot. It's a conservative characteristic. So who's kidding who, Stevie?
Hildebrand isn't talking to me - he doesn't know I exist - but if he was I'd tell him that if that's the way he's thinking he ought to quit and join the party that agrees with him. The GOP, where party members vote in lockstep and criticism earns you the Gulag. Moderate Pubs who questioned Bush's extremist neocon policies were purged from the party. Is Mr Hildebrand preparing to do that with real liberals troubled by the overabundance of Clintonian and DLC hacks BO is appointing?
Jane points out that Hildebrand is using much the same tactic that Glenn Greenwald caught NPR's Tom Djelten using: mischaracterizing Left-wing arguments in order to minimize or ridicule them.
People on the left are not looking at Obama's appointments with a jaundiced eye because they think he needs to apply some liberal orthodoxy litmus test. They have legitimate concerns that people like Geitner, Summers and other Rubin acolytes created this mess, and it's reasonable to ask why they're being appointed to get us out of it.
It's disturbing that one of Obama's key people is stooping to the same shabby tricks our lazy media mavens use to evade responsibility for doing their jobs. As a real Democrat once said, Steve: "If you can't stand the heat, get the hell out of the kitchen."
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