By now, you have probably read or seen reports about today's op-ed piece in the Huffington Post, in which Obama adviser Scott Hildebrand scolds the "left wing" as follows: "This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making," the reason being that

"our president surround[s] himself with the most qualified people to address these challenges. After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people - not just those on the left."

In short, it's all about qualifications, regardless of ideology.

The following is Glen Greenwald's comeback:

If "qualifications" were all that mattered, Barack Obama wouldn't be President.  People voted for him despite his lack of qualifications, not because of his abundance of them.  Does anyone dispute that Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, and David Addington, and John Aschroft and Hank Paulson were supremely "qualified" in every sense that this term is normally meant?  What made them atrocious wasn't their lack of qualifications but their ideology and belief system, and what made Obama attactive to many people wasn't that he was "most qualified" but was his ideology and belief system.

Here is the riposte by Jane Hamsher, founder of firedoglake.com:

"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.  While some of us want to give Obama a chance to fulfill the promises he campaigned on and work with the staff of his choice in order to do so, we'd have to be a bunch of intellectually dishonest kool-aid swilling freaks to pretend  his economics team didn't have some troublesome baggage."

Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld of TPM do not seem happy that "completely legit questions" from many on the left prompted this attack:

After all, many on "the left" have also made Hildebrand's point: They've noted that Obama should be allowed to let his actual policies do the talking, while simultaneously asking completely legit questions about what his choices portend about the future direction of his administration. If merely asking such questions is enough to incite an attack on "the left" from someone in Obama's inner circle, it seems reasonable to conclude that the motive here isn't to mend fences at all. (my emphasis)

Digby is gobsmacked:

I am gobsmacked by this HuffPo piece by Steve Hildebrand, punching the hippies on the left for... having opinions.

[...]

In other words, you should just STFU and enjoy the new dawn with your dear leader.

That's not really how America works. And this lashing out from a senior Obama aide at a really small group of critics, who aren't really displaying much more than concern, and who for the most part have offered support for the policy pronouncements coming out of the transition, is extremely depressing. I don't think he's serving his former boss very well by seeking to silence dissent and building straw men on "the left," lying about their interests and concerns.

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I'm curious as to what the Center for American Progress, one of whose missions is to promote "progressive ideals put forth by such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King," will have to say about the ridiculous proposal put forth by one its experts yesterday in a Washington Post opinion piece, in which he argues that presidential advisers should be required to sign a contract banning them from denouncing the actions of the commander in chief for the first 5 years after the latter's departure. Miller calls it "political prenup":

In other words, it is time for the political prenuptial. Barack Obama should simply require key advisers and officials to sign a binding contract of confidentiality as a condition of employment. Aides should pledge not to disclose anything they see until, say, five years after their boss leaves office. The legitimate claims of history would thus be honored, along with the rightful expectations of presidents

Ironically, the Center for American Progress' blog, Thinkprogress.org, touted adviser Scott McClelland (whom Miller criticizes in his op-ed) earlier this year for accusing Karl Rove of contradicting himself regarding the outing of Valerie Plame, based on a conversation they had in September 2003.

My personal recollection is that the overwhelming majority of people who reacted negatively to McClellan's revelations were conservative commentators. This blog post by TPM contributor and founder of the Washington Note blog, Steve Clemons, is just one of the many warm reactions on the progressive side to the initial news of McClelland's confessions.

I don't expect any serious progressive, including Obama himself, to agree with this absurd, far-fetched proposal. Besides being a possible violation of the First Amendment, we need less secrecy, not more, after 8 shady years of Bush/Cheney.