Is Obama waving goodbye to "change"?
It definitely felt like a hangover. I hit the sack at 4 am only to be woken 3 hours later by my 8-year old son. He was hovering over me. "Can you tie my school tie, daddy?" Then my wife intensified the misery. "Steve, you have to find Christopher's football gear. He has practise today." Some way to celebrate the end of the worst presidency in American (or do I mean human?) history.
Still, I managed to smile. Our decrepit war hero and his village idiot partner had been cast into the dustbin of history. The morally bankrupt Republican Party melted down to irrelevance. Altogether, it was a pretty satisfying result although it's frightening to think that McCain/Palin somehow managed to secure 45% of the vote.
The media couldn't get enough of the biggest global party of the century. Images of joyous Americans, Germans, French, Indonesians, Kenyans dominated newspapers and television. The verdict on 8 years of Bush was crystal clear. One has to go back to the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaucescu to recall such unmitigated joy.
Yet we need to be careful. Obama has not brought change to America. All that is certain is that a change in American thinking has brought Obama to power. The authenticity of Obama's change will be revealed through his choice of cabinet. Indeed, it is instructive to note who is not popping open the champagne.
While Chicago danced in the park, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that Russia will station short-range missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave, a clear response to America's "anti-Iranian" missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Is this the "test" that the prophet and self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden warned of during the election campaign? I pray that it is. Will Obama lower the temperature and pledge to dismantle the shield? Or will he continue to maintain the fiction of the threat of an Iranian missile strike on Europe? Russia, it seems, is demanding early proof of "change".
Unfortunately with America facing crises on so many different fronts (wars, economy, health, energy), the conventional wisdom is that Obama must assemble a cabinet ASAP. This plays into the hands of the Clintons and their mafia who are more than ready to infiltrate the corridors of power in the name of "experience". Veteran interventionists of the Clinton years such as Richard Holbrooke and Strobe Talbott have returned to the op-ed pages of the Guardian and the FT urging the new administration to stand-up to Russia "aggression" and obstruct Serbian "mischief" in Bosnia. A Clintonian offensive to re-capture the levers of foreign policy appears to be well underway.
There are other bad signs. Obama has already appoined Clintonite Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. The powers of the Chief of Staff are not defined in the Constitution (who reads that obsolete document these days anyway) but he controls who gets to see the President. It is an alarming first step in sealing off Obama from those who may see the world differently from the Clintons.
I have a horrible sense of deja vu.
