Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The Awesomeness of Repeated Failures

You have been warned. The first three paragraphs of this Washington Post article (dictated, not typed by Rahm Emanuel) are filled with so much bullshit it will make your head spin:
Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.
Why is Rahm a caricature? I'm sure the dozens of fawning tributes that the post has run over the past year have nothing to do with this at all. He may be a prime target for some, but you sure wouldn't notice that if you read the post.
But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.
A contrarian narrative where the president's chief of staff was mysteriously not involved with any of the Administration's failures?
It is a view propounded by lawmakers and early supporters of President Obama who are frustrated because they think the administration has gone for the perfect at the expense of the plausible. They believe Emanuel, the town's leading purveyor of four-letter words, a former Israeli army volunteer and a product of a famously argumentative family, was not aggressive enough in trying to persuade a singularly self-assured president and a coterie of true-believer advisers that "change you can believe in" is best pursued through accomplishments you can pass.
I want you to re-read that first sentence, just to make sure you understand that this was printed without comment in a publication that once broke the watergate scandal:
It is a view propounded by lawmakers and early supporters of President Obama who are frustrated because they think the administration has gone for the perfect at the expense of the plausible.
Can you name something, no matter how small, in Obama's first year where you can claim he went for the perfect at the expense of the plausible?

It's actually just as hard to think of a time when he didn't go for a watered down Republican idea at expense something that might actually work.

There's a reason Rahm is ghostwriting all these articles and trying to save his legacy. The Obama administration was has been run exactly how Rahm wanted it done. He knows those failures are on him, and none are bigger than Health Care, which was run like his own personal Blueprint on how to pass a bill.

I understand why he's trying to rehabilitate his legacy. Why the Washington Post feels the need to transcribe his alternate reality in their news section is beyond me.

1 comment:

  1. "they think the administration has gone for the perfect at the expense of the plausible."

    oh no way

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