The Blog @ Spolitics

A Trip to the Memory Hole: Foreign Policy Lightweights

Unfortunately, according to our President-elect and likely Secretary of State neither of them will be qualified for their jobs:

[Hillary] Clinton zeroed in on Obama’s remark that his “strongest” foreign policy experience came from living in Indonesia as a child.

“Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face,” Clinton said in a speech to an audience in Iowa.

Obama’s response?

I know, I know… they’re “just words.”

Retrospective Irony

Note: This post has been updated.

A recent article in Time linked to a review of the Top 25 blogs. Although undated, the permalink suggests the reviews were written last year, which makes one wonder why Time linked to them as if they were still current, but I digress.

In its review of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Time had this to say:

He endorsed George Bush in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and seems to be leaning toward Barack Obama this year.

For anyone who didn’t follow Sully’s descent into hysterical madness, he ended up “leaning” so far over he fell into Barack Obama’s lap. In addition to repeatedly titling posts and signing them off with the oxymoronic phrase “know hope,” Sully had to this to say the night of Obama’s convention speech:

I’ve said it before – months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

He also became so fanatically driven to try to smear Sarah Palin that he perpetuated the unfounded rumor that Trig wasn’t really her baby and repeatedly called on her to release her medical records to prove she was his mother — even after the election!

If Time is going to continue linking to that review they may want to update it. In the meantime, it still gave me a good laugh to see Sully portrayed as a moderate.

White House Team or United Colors of Benetton Ad?

Megan McArdle is pretty ticked off about the selection process Barack Obama is using to build his White House team. It appears his top criteria is that it ends up looking like a United Colors of Benetton ad.

More to the point, the worst financial crisis in seventy years is really not the time to see if you can brighten up the CEA offices with a nice, decorative matched set of X chromosomes. Goolsbee has been advising Obama since the beginning; presumably, this is some sort of testimony to the esteem in which Obama holds his competence. Throwing him overboard now makes this look like less of a “plus factor” and more like Obama is much less concerned with competence than painting a pretty picture for voters. Given the stakes, that’s more than a little irresponsible.

And that’s coming from an (increasingly dismayed) Obama supporter. Megan’s blog is a is great place to get an informative take on events without the partisan spin. But on this one I have to blame her disappointment on willful ignorance. I mean, come on… it’s not like she wasn’t warned. As a Libertarian, she should have known that supporting a Democrat would only lead to regret.