Party Over?

Okay it's time to stop snickering at Sarah Palin. Don't want to be a party pooper, but the bad news is starting to trickle in from Iraq, Pakistan, and Gaza. And I'm not even going to get into the economy, or even Madonna and A-Rod. It's time to face reality, and it isn't all that pretty, notwithstanding the promise of presidential puppy. (Could it be? Puppy politics becomes another form of playing the "mixed" race card?)

             The first of several matters that may stand in the way of our unconditional love for the "skinny kid from Hawaii with a funny name" (but does he have game?) are some controversial cabinet selections:

1) There are concerns about some crazy stuff Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's father apparently said, with no word so far on Rahm's desire himself to distance himself from these remarks. Ewan MacCaskill and Suzanne Goldberg of the Guardian UK write:

In an interview with the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son's appointment would be good for Israel. 'Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel,' he was quoted as saying. 'Why wouldn't he be? What, is he an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House.'" 

Hopefully something was lost in the translation.

2) Another touchy subject is Lawrence "Larry" Summers potential nomination as treasury secretary. You probably remember his strange comments on the intellectual inferiority of women while president of Harvard University. Perhaps more important was Summers' central role in the implementation of NAFTA which he did at under-secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton. U.S. labor activist Peter Cervantes-Gautschi writes that Summers "engineered the destruction of Mexico's economy through forced increase of interest rates to unmanageable levels--business and farm loans went from 11% to 56%, credit card rates from 7% to 61%, home loans from 5% to 615, car loans from 7% to 91%. The result was massive human suffering and the forced migration of millions of economic refugees to the U.S."

3) Finally, Eric Holder, of the prestigious law firm Covington and Burling, has been mentioned as a possible attorney general candidate. It turns out that Holder is a lawyer for Chiquita Brands International, which has admitted to paying $1.7 million and supplying arms to Colombian paramilitary death squads, leading to the death of 4000 Colombian civilians in the banana growing regions of that country.  So much for Obama's enlightened remarks during the debate on why he was cautious about the Colombia free trade agreement? 

To give Obama credit, he has not given in to Bush on tying the Colombia free trade agreement to a bailout of US auto makers. And the Holder appointment is not a given.

But it remains to be seen just what all this talk of "post-partisan" politics really means.