Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Power Has Returned

Pulitzer Prize winning author, anti-genocide activist, scholar, and international affairs expert Samantha Power will be entering the Obama administration as a top foreign policy aide.

This is fabulous news. When Power resigned from the Obama campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster", I said it was the right thing to do. One simply can't tolerate that sort of language, particularly directed at a distinguished public servant like then-Sen. Clinton.

But I also hoped that she would rehabilitate herself and return to the fold. Samantha Power is simply too bright and too important a figure to be kept on the sidelines. Her and the now-Secretary of State have apparently buried the hatchet, and America is far, far better with both of these two incredibly impressive women at the forefront of our foreign policy in this critical time.

3 comments:

PG said...

My understanding is that the standard way to get around that is to refuse the salary increase until there is another vote on it where the officeholder isn't eligible to vote. So Sec. Clinton can just take whatever was the 2000-era salary until there's another vote to raise the salary (which could be pretty easy: just say, "OK, we're raising it 1 cent," and now she's eligible for it).

Cycle Cyril said...

So many of Obama's promises seem to come with an expiration date.

Close Gitmo immediately
Stop waterboarding
Conserve energy

And now picking up Powers from under the bus where he threw her.

Powers is anti-Israel in her reasoning and instinct. Expect Obama to put heavy pressure on Israel on tangible concessions while using the excuse that is the only way the Palestinians will accommodate any negotiations (while re-arming).

Perhaps this book can explain the disconnect between the evident intelligence of people and their irrational beliefs.

PG said...

CC,

Odd how you don't have a link for Obama's promising to close Gitmo "immediately," or for that matter a nonexistent promise never to employ Samantha Power, or a nonexistent promise that he wouldn't put his thermostat in a room he currently inhabits at a higher temperature than Bush did. And your link doesn't say that waterboarding will be one of the possible classified methods -- in fact, it says it specifically won't be.

Nice try, though.

The anti-Obama people are really obsessed with the "thrown under the bus" cliche. Is it just a lack of linguistic creativity that explains why no other phrase to describe "sacrifice of erstwhile friend for personal gain" ever comes up with y'all? Sort of like the level of literacy at work in "I don't like internal rhyme, therefore that's not what Obama was doing, therefore there's some deep significance to his word ordering that I won't actually articulate but will instead hint darkly about"?