Appointments

For the most part, Barack Obama has done a good job with his cabinet appointments. Eric Holder will make a fine attorney general, and has just this morning gone on the record as saying that 'waterboarding is torture.' Picking Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff showed that the administration had balls, and that 'fucking around' would simply not be tolerated. Picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State showed the same thing, except with bigger balls.



Then there's Timothy Geithner, Obama's pick to head up the Treasury. It turns out the man chosen to fix the broken economy owes around $30,000 in back taxes. But it doesn't end there. Geithner also broke the golden rule of cabinet appointments: Thou shall not have hired illegal immigrants in the past. Didn't Clinton already go through all this with his Attorney General search in 1992? Was Geithner not paying attention? Geithener, it appears, will move through to confirmation. Bill Richardson, however, wasn't as lucky.



Obama has also come under fire for his choice of Leon Panetta as CIA director, and his retaining Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense. The Gates move is tricky cause on the one hand it's a dumb move. Obama made a name for himself by bashing Bush and his Iraq war. And now the first thing he does is keep Bush's number one man in Iraq. But on the other hand, it's a very smart move. Iraq's a mess. Obama himself used to refer to the Iraq war as a bus that had crashed into a ditch. Changing SecDef's at this point would probably only achieve partisan goals.