Dedicated liberals have no political party. Time to start one.

FDR would have kept him around. He liked being prodded to do the right thing by liberals

By liberals maybe. When FDR was experimenting with devaluing the $ Dean Acheson , then at the Treasury opposed him . Until FDR had enough and one morning Acheson opened the paper to find ,to his suprise that he had "resigned".

A few days later his successor was sworn in. The next day when FDR opened his paper it was his turn to be surprised. There was the photo of Acheson's replacement being sworn in and behind him unmistakable with his mustache and bowler , beaming approval, was ..Acheson.

A while later FDR replaced another official who then complained to the press. FDR remarked
"Tell that guy to talk to Acheson about how a gentleman goes about leaving an Administration."

What is up with Obama?

This Just In! (h/t HuffPo)

Phillip Carter Resigns

Phillip Carter, the top detainee affairs policy appointee at the Pentagon, has quit his post after just seven months on the job, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. Carter told the Washington Post that he was leaving for "personal and family reasons."

Carter, an Army captain who served in Iraq, had been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's detention policy. He wrote extensively on national security and intelligence issues on his blog, IntelDump, before joining Barack Obama's presidential campaign last year to oversee outreach to veterans...

...Carter's move comes days after President Obama acknowledged publicly for the first time that his administration would not meet its goal to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010.

White House counsel Greg Craig, who played a major role in setting detainee policy for Obama, also announced his resignation this month

Maybe there's something in the air.

RE: "Gregory Craig -- who was essentially dumped for trying to make the administration live up to its campaign pledges on Guantanamo and other civil liberties issues" - MJ Rosenberg

MY COMMENT: I wish I could attribute all of this to "the people advising him"[knife striking tabletop repeatedly], but in the area of civil liberties (perhaps as opposed to military matters), constitutional law professor Obama knows precisely what he is doing. The fact that he was the best candidate with a realistic chance of winning is becoming less and less consolation.

SEE: "Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record", BY GLENN GREENWALD, 11/24/09
LINK - http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/24/civil_liberties/index.html

ALSO: "Phil Carter's resignation from key detainee policy post", BY GLENN GREENWALD, 11/25/09
LINK - http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/25/carter/index.html

I think a lot of this will be coming home to roost in 2010 (and 2012).

Right now, I give Obama a 50/50 chance of being a one term wonder, trending downward. At least Carter will have someone to pass the torch to.

I very much agree that the Obama White House is due for a shakeup. It appears that the two key factors are the freedom of the White House to act and the degree to which the White House and Obama are aware of the problem(s) they have (as well as how important they consider those problems.)

I'm outside the beltway, but I suspect that Obama was educated and his staff designed for two things - win the election and pass health care. They sort of figured that if they accomplished those two things they could let the Pentagon handle the remains of the two crap wars the conservatives started, at least which HCR was being taken care of.

What's happened is that Afghanistan is in worse shape than they expected and that the economy simply imploded. There is no real Presidential level "slack" with which to deal with those items because the conservative Republican desperation to defeat HCR is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. The result is an absence of guidance and control from the very top on most of what the government is doing. In such a climate the federal government will continue to march as before. Change has to come from the top.

The fact that the Republicans are slow-walking Obama's political appointees through the Senate adds to the shortage of competence in the administration. There was no one who did what Dick Cheney did in 2001 when he appointed his people across the government to implement the changes he wanted. John Bolton and Dick Addington are Cheney poster-boys. That delay in getting political appointees into place means that Civil Servants are doing what the political appointees should be doing, and those top civil servants are either promoted there during the Bush mal-administration or are Bush political appointees who have burrowed in.

Personally I don't think the Obama administration dares make big changes until HCR is finished. after that, though, it's going to depend a lot on how impervious the bubble Obama is in. If he recognizes that (the top priority, in my opinion) he is being poorly served by Geitner and Summers, then something is going to change there. Awareness of the problem and freedom to act are the keys.

Right now there is simply no freedom to act. Whether there is awareness of the problem and awareness of how important the problem is will be something we out here in the hinterlands will not recognize until sometime next year. Which, of course, is going to be complicated as the election gets closer.

I have to laugh. We actually have Democrats who act vis a vis Obama the way Repubs acted vis a vis Bush.
All criticism is whining.
How utterly unpatriotic.

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