Rahm Emanuel may well suck, but laying the blame for the disaster that
health care reform has become, and the relentless back-tracking on
civil liberties, and the overall decline in political fortunes that
this White House has presided over on his shoulders is not that useful.
Obama is the guy in charge. Obama doesn’t have to keep him around, he
doesn’t have to listen to his advice, he doesn’t have to let him do
anything but exactly what the President wants. The White House is a
black box – it’s not important how it works, only if it works. And it
doesn’t.
My feelings about Rahm Emmanuel are the same as they are about everybody on the President’s staff including the interns and the guy who peels potatoes in the White House kitchen: Keep your head out of your ass and your foot up the Republicans’ and we have no problem, you and me. Fuck that up, and I’m not gonna get mad at you. I’m gonna get mad at the President, who is your boss, who I hired to keep your ass in line. I’m gonna call him up and yell, “FIX IT and keep your people out of their own nonsense for a minute so I can think, already, Jesus God.”
Yeah, I’m fun to work for. There’s a reason I don’t supervise people.
Karl Rove was not Bush’s brain. Doug Feith was not responsible for the Iraq War. John Yoo did not singlehandledly create a culture of torture and mayhem. None of the shit that happened under Bush happened because Bush just couldn’t take care of it. It happened because he either wanted it to happen or didn’t care enough to stop it. The people who work for a president are symptoms; they’re not the disease. And I refuse to believe that we need to let the president off the hook for any of it.
Somebody making you look like an asshole in public, saying shit you don’t want said out loud, doing things without authorization, not delivering the results you asked for, and drawing way, way too much attention to himself? There’s a reason the pink slip was invented. And you don’t fire that guy, I’m gonna start making judgments on how much you really mean it when you say you want one thing, and he does another.
A.