THE DAILY BLADE: Is This Any Way To Run A Transition?
Back in January, Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, confidently opined, “Obama’s transition has unspooled in much the same way his campaign did: smoothly, calmly, and on time.” Mind you, this was almost two weeks after the Richardson debacle.
Exactly a month after Hertzberg’s assessment, the New York Times observed: “President Obama blasted through all sorts of speed records pushing a $787 billion economic plan through Congress, arguing it was too urgent to wait. But even after signing it into law Tuesday, he faces another problem: virtually no one is in place at his cabinet departments to actually spend a lot of the money.” Echoed sister paper, The Boston Globe: “Only about 70 people have been formally nominated to fill the roughly 500 senior posts in the Defense, State, Treasury, and Education departments and dozens of other government agencies, according to White House records.”
Two months later, New York Daily News political analyst Michael Goodwin recounted his being approached by “a veteran Democratic pol … with a pained look on his face” who wanted to know: “Do you think they know what they're doing?” Noting that it wasn’t until George W. Bush’s second term that “that the I-word - incompetence - became a routine broadside against him,” Goodwin wrote: “Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House.”
Brushing off a letter from Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) warning that "rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances," Obama began appointing "czars" (there are now 32 of them) who oversee his administration’s policy initiatives on everything from Afghanistan (Richard Holbrooke) to WMD (Gary Samore). In an interview with FOX News’ Wendell Goler Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) pointed to ambiguity about accountability: "Who's in charge of health care? Is it the secretary of Health and Human Services? Or is the White House czar?”
The question of who’s in charge is even more relevant at the State Department where the czars are called “special envoys,” and also do not require Senate confirmation. This “empire of envoys,” as one foreign policy veteran dubbed them, has “created a confusing patchwork of policy fiefdoms inside the administration that lacks clearly defined lines of command and has the potential for miscommunication on a grand scale,” reports The Washington Times.
Obama was in such a frenzy to appoint czars and envoys, that more than seven months since he took office, “just 43 percent" of those 500 senior policymaking posts have been filled, reports The New York Times:
He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.
He sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Africa to talk about international development but does not have anyone running the Agency for International Development. He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.
Yup, smooth, calm and on time!
The Times explains that the White House became “more cautious” after a string of nominations “blew up last spring” and it became apparent that rather than rubberstamping Obama’s selections, the Senate is taking its advice and consent role seriously by “intensively investigating nominees.” So Obama’s solution is to sidestep the Senate and create what one lawmaker calls “a parallel government.” This is but the latest example of how Obama is shredding the Constitution; there’ll be others to come.
Editorial Note: In an unintentionally farcical quote, University of North Carolina professor Terry Sullivan, who runs the non-partisan White House Transition Project tells The Times: “If you’re running G.M. without half your senior executives in place, are you worried? I’d say your stockholders would be going nuts.” Um, Obama is running General Motors - and Chrysler, too.
We Fight Them Over There … And Invite Them Over Here
On the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the U.S. The Stiletto wondered why President George W. Bush was expanding a program that brought young Saudi men to study in our universities – quintupling the number to 15,000:
The Stiletto doubts that exposing young Saudis to American education and culture will make them more sympathetic to us – it may well have the opposite effect, and reinforce the fundamentalist Muslim view of America as a decadent and immoral society. …
This program invites inside our borders thousands of young men already primed by their restrictive, intolerant culture to be jihadis. How sharp is that?
An article in The Washington Times about the techniques used by the CIA to get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to reveal details of the plot he masterminded, includes this bit of biography that KSM divulged during interrogations at "black sites":
Mohammed told interrogators he had minimal contact with Americans while attending North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, but that those contacts convinced him that the U.S. was a "debauched and racist country."
Mohammed told investigators that he was so intent on carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks that he purposely did not swear a loyalty pledge to Osama bin Laden. That way, if al Qaeda's senior leader were to cancel the plot, Mohammed could ignore him and go ahead with the attack.
Anyone serious about protecting our country against home-grown terrorism would immediately cancel student visas for nationals from countries known to harbor terrorist training camps, and shut down this pipeline that will bring the next KSM to a college campus somewhere in the U.S. (if he’s not amongst us already). But having seen the jaw-dropping spectacle of President Barack Hussein Obama reverently bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, The Stiletto is not holding out hope that this ridiculous policy will change. Not to be outdone by Bush, watch Obama himself quintuple the number of student visas offered to Saudis.
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