Eric Holder’s confirmation hearing is shaping up to be the first partisan clash of 2009. This report explains:
The confirmation hearing for Eric Holder, Obama’s pick for attorney general, promises to be bruising, with Republicans determined to explore Holder’s role in controversial pardons under President Clinton, his views on gun rights, and his involvement in the case of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy returned to his homeland by Clinton’s Justice Department.
“You’re probably only going to have one truly horrendous confirmation; that’s always the case,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who served on the White House staffs of presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. “In this case, it is clearly the attorney general-designate, Eric Holder.”
Front and center will be the Marc Rich pardon. But, if this account is to be believed, Holder is not offering much of a defense, just a change of topic:
An Obama transition official, granted anonymity to address strategy, said that Holder, if challenged on whether in light of the Rich case he can be trusted to display political independence from the president, will cite two high-profile example of him breaking with party leaders.
The first, according to the transition official, was Holder’s prosecution, as US attorney for the District of Columbia, of former US representative Dan Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat and House Ways and Means Committee chairman who served prison time for misusing taxpayer money. The second, the official said, was Holder’s support, while deputy attorney general, of broadening independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigations into Clinton’s activities.
The Ken Starr defense is an odd one, not merely because it is likely to inflame the Left (Oh, he was the one who fanned the flames of the Starr inquiry!), but because it also involves a credibility issue, detailed here.
Aside from that, the more central issue remains: did Holder commit a serious ethical breach in helping guide the Marc Rich pardon through and past the Justice Department? And, did he lie about the extent of his involvement when questioned by Congress in 2001? Whether that is a single “error” or lots of errors all tied up with his desire for promotion in the then anticipated Gore administration will be one of the issues to be explored at the hearing.
But it hardly seems an appropriate defense for an attorney general to say, in essence, “Okay, I folded like a cheap suitcase and lied to cover my tracks, but I stood on principle plenty of other times.” That doesn’t sound like a very persuasive argument, especially when one of the key issues is lying to Congress. That particular offense, we have heard from Democrats again and again, is an unforgivable sin. Certainly, it’s not the behavior one would expect of an attorney general.
I suspect the Holder team will need to go back to the drawing board. Eventually, he will need to explain, if not atone for, his conduct in the Rich pardon. No amount of misdirection will throw Arlen Specter and the other Republicans on the committee off the trail.
“[I]ncoherence?” More like surrender.
“– and dismantling the free market system have taken most of his time of late.”
He is CONTINUING to dismantle the system that the government has created over the last forty years,but more accurately,he is overseeing a system coming apart at the seams(with or without his help),which started with the collapse of Bear Stearns, Does anyone out there believe that there’s any way to revive this economy without Radical changes is our financial system itself? The #1 problem,as always,is how to remove the government ,from the Economic process when only the government has the power to make those changes.
Yeah Jen, I didn’t realize that Obama provoked the market collapse last fall. That’s pretty amazing he was able to do that. All that one man can do! Stunning.
Arabists and the left/media are one constituency. Jews are another. There’s no incoherence from a purely electioneering angle. And for Obama that’s pretty much the only one that counts.
More like amnesia. Simple passage of time, aka entropy, has eroded vigilance. It’s probably unavoidable that the populace at large will forget, and that gladly, what happened on September 11, 2001. But for a president to give every indication that he too is glad to forget about it is cringe-making.
The horror of that day is as well the inadequate measure of another day, one yet to come. Bush and Cheney never took their eyes off that possibility. Obama? Does he imagine that 9/11 was a one-off affair? That we’re past that and now can get on with what’s truly important? Where, in all the plans for a welfare state now aborning, has anyone calculated the economic and social-welfare impact of another strike on the United States involving weapons more terrible than commercial airliners?
The perpetrators of another holocaust are still out there. They are hourly plotting another day of infamy. The Democrats and Obama chief among them, I suspect, truly believe that some change in policy, likely involving Israel, some hand extended amiably, is all we really require to avoid that day. If so, there is a calamity in the making. The rage of the Islamists is rooted, not in American foreign policy, so that if they are freed from its influence, their anger will dissipate, but instead is planted in their awareness that they cannot insulate the Muslim world from Western, particularly American, culture. That, after all, is why the Islamic utopia necessarily requires an hermetically sealed Sharia state- Afghanistan, Swat, Somalia, Iran, Iraq – from which infidels and all their Satanic practices are excluded. At the same time, however, they realize that such a polity is impossible so long as there is a powerful non-Islamic culture anywhere in the world, especially this world, which is far larger and interconnected than the Arabian desert of the Seventh and Eighth centuries.
The irony is that the Arabs, bent on conquest and spreading their faith in equal measure, swarmed out of that desert, where, then anyway, a Sharia state was quite possible, and rushed upon the rest of the world, and they have bitterly resented any resistance to their aims ever since.
So the bin Ladens and Zawahiris and Mehsuds and Khameinis plan for that day. They count on that day to secure their non-negotiable hopes for the world. Like the assassins in Macbeth, their hope and exhortation is “Let it come down.”
“I didn’t realize that Obama provoked the market collapse last fall”
As the now-disgraced financial guru, Mr. Rubin, used to say, “The market goes up, the market goes down.” And it does. What matters is how the governors of the economy respond.
The “market collapse” in the last Fall of the Bush presidency was less devastating, for most of us, than that in the last Fall of Clinton when the tech bubble popped. But we hardly remember that now. Sensible policies in the early days of the Bush administration got us past that, and the awful 9/11 kicker as well.
Now we have the popped the real estate bubble, and that problem has been passed on to the Obama administration. In fact, it is the probable reason we have an Obama administration. We shall see how they do in handling it. The early signs aren’t very promising – they seem well on the way to turning a recession into a depression. My bet is that the Bush folks who faced the left-over Clinton challenges of 2000 are going to look awfully good when the comparisons are in.
The consensus on this chain of Replies, then, is that Obama is, at best, voting “present” on foreign affairs, with the result that the Islamic extremists and their allies will continue to make inroads.
There is still the assumption, however, that Obama would be dismayed if and when those inroads include an attack on the U.S. Other than the political impact of such an attack — and he may well feel that he could safely/advantageously spin that problem — what is the evidence to support the assumption of his dismay? As the old Left adage went, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Voting present or not, he’s now a large part of the problem.
franglo, his economic policy proposals – which are hostile to business – have caused the following: the steepest drop in the stock market on an election day since the stock market began (usually the market gets a bump on election day) and the steepest drop in the market on an inaugurations day since the stock market began. Add in the stock market drops every time Obama opens his mouth about the economy.
This is not socking it to “nasty greedy capitalists,” this is the 401k or mutual fund or any pension or retirement fund of half the people in the country. The stock market did great under Bush, until the 2006 Congress came in. maybe that was a lag, but the events I describe above were reactions to Obama. Why? Because he wants to tax everyone who invests in economic growth. he doesn’t care about jobs, he cares about expanding federal power.
If Obama is less than passionate about foreign policy, and all amped up on growing the welfare state and bullying the private sector, then why not at least rely on someone like Richard Holbrook to recommend someone for a position such as Freeman’s?
And the folly of installing Clinton as secretary of state is becoming clearer every day. We might be seeing a president more naive and wobbly in defense of this nation than Jimmy Carter.
Obama’s the belle of the ball, has been probably since 2004, at least since late 2007. What evidence has ever been brought before his eyes that he can’t talk himself out of anything, turn any setback to his advantage? Put starkly, why shouldn’t he on some level see any downturn in our fortunes, any act against the US, as just another in a rising series of political-rhetorical opportunities? Look what he’s doing with his new president’s popularity. Imagine what he might try with rally-effect numbers and a sense of real emergency.
I don’t think – that is, I’m not at all sure – that Obama is a monster. I’m loathe to assume that anyone wouldn’t at least, to use GLL’s word, be dismayed by violence, especially by massive or spectacular violence, against his fellow citizens (of the US or of the world), but, in the wake of his first month and a half, and looking back on his past positions, his shameless dishonesty, and his unrestrained opportunism, it’s getting difficult to presume that he would acknowledge any restrictions.
“Sensible policies in the early days of the Bush administration got us past that”
like?? the tech bubble was worse than the real estate bubble??
you sound like a bug larry kudlow fan/ maniac.
gold was $266 an ounce when bush entered the oval and went as high as $1033
he and greenspan inflated the heck out of the currency and created the housing bubble in doing so.
the tech bubble doesn’t come close. the dow was 10,000 when clinton left, it had gone as low as 7,400 when bush left and still hasn’t recovered. Obamas treasury secretary has done a bad job so far but to say Bush was somehow better than clinton or obama is insanity. he was the worst ever. worse than carter
I can’t really say that it matters what a bunch of foreigners — in the case of Commentary, a bunch of Israelis — think about our president. Commentary, your country has a prime minister, or it soon will. Spent your time with your leader, Bibi. Leave my country alone.
Check your facts, Lester. The NASAQ lost 60% in the Clinton Fall, about 30% in the Bush Fall (and about the same since Obama took over). It is higher today than it was at the Bush trough in 2002, after 9/11.
To any who think that objections to Obama, and support for Israel are a “neocon” or Jewish thing, sorry to disabuse you of this notion. I’m a pale male Anglo Saxon Protestant — an old-school conservative.
Americans should be aghast at the radical makeover of our society that Obama is attempting. He is no moderate. Never has been. Be not surprised by any of this; hoping for the best from Obama is fine, but don’t ignore the man’s past.
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. And let’s us conservatives start winning elections again by not being the same as the big-government Democrats.
John Rich, you’re probably an evangelical neocon who sides with the Coomentary traitor AIPAC foreign agent Bund because you’ve read Hal Lindsey’s books and don’t realize that they’re based on a 19th Century heresy.
Jennifer,
Have you given a thought to the notion that “incoherence” might be far better than the strong hand of Obama at the tiller?
It might be better for for the ship to careen wildly hither and yon, than for it to pursue the course that Obama would chart out for it.
When the F-14 goes into a flat spin, the pilot is instructed to do NOTHING, and not attempt to immediately right the aircraft. It seems the pilot’s attempts to immediately restore powered flight impedes the aircraft from righting itself. For pilots, the idea of letting the airplane right itself is almost a heresy, and flies in the face of most of what they learned.
What we know of Obama, what we know of his choice of associates, what he’s read, what he’s absorbed, the authors he’s revered, the mentors he’s chosen, ————- the guy is a radical, despite all of the wishful thinking of creatures like Powell, Brooks, Adelmann, et al.
I would prefer a do nothing at the helm, rather than a whacked out radical.
Lester the molester,
In the aftermath of 9/11, America ran the real risk of falling into a DEflation.
Now a deflation is even more dangerous than a recession, for reasons I won’t go into. But it’s a deflationary cycle that Japan has been in for the last decade.
So as to ward off the risk of entering a deflationary spiral, the Fed and Bush embarked on a DELIBERATE inflationary course.
That worked, because it did prevent America entering a deflationary cycle.
But that wasn’t THE KEY factor in causing what we’re currently experiencing.
What did that was a runaway, out of control budget, but more importantly, it was the actions of a freakshow, Barney Frank.
Who the Democrats, in the depths of their folly, look to for answeres in a crisis he created!
Neocomradess #0 must be a textbook case of what Mr. James of Harvard used to diagnose as “tender-mindedness” and characterized as follows in the first chapter of _Pragmatism_ (1907):
THE TENDER-MINDED / Rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical
#0 gives herself away by invokin’ ‘incoherence’ as if it were the Black Death.
Happy days.
#17
Please go into the reasons why a deflation is more dangerous than a recession.
the fed’s lowering the interest rates and keep it there had nothing to do with fighting any ghost deflation. central planning doesn’t work no matter how you try and justify it and boy are we paying the price for it now.