Is The Obama Cabinet Working Against America's Interest?

Investor's Business Daily ^ | 05/04/2012 | VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

[Ooh-Ah]

We've had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations ...but never anything quite like the present bunch.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1% already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90% — to pay more for what he calls "the privilege of being an American."

Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children's camp costs as a dependent-care deduction.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the near impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the U.S. on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them to just about 2% of available offshore lands and 6% of onshore.

Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are now found on private lands despite, not because of, the Interior Department.

When he was a U.S. senator, Salazar claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not change his mind about voting to increase offshore drilling. And although he controls the leases of the richest oil and gas reserves in the Western world, he just recently shrugged that no one knew whether gas would hit $9 a gallon.

Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green companies like Solyndra, First Solar and Solar Trust of America — the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu once infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. ...

[Mark17]

Comment: Some say maliciously

I think it is way beyond malicious, I think it is diabolicical.

[baddog 219]

[Billthedrill]

The common theme with these Cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry — and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.

The first of these I ascribe to their generally academic origins, wherein self-righteous noise is at a premium. The utopian zealotry, to their nearly unanimous left-wing origins, and the ruling-class behaviors to their own expectations that they are running a Cold War police state wherein the commissars are supermen, and not a representative government (such as it is) that is supposed to be working for the electorate and not the other way around.

The persistence of the term "rule" within the nomenclatura is indicative of where these people are finding their political precepts. "Represent" occurs only insofar as a specific oppressed class is involved and it always occurs at the expense of everyone else.

They need to be shown the door, and this is the only thing that might motivate me to cast a vote for Mr. Romney: the assurance that he can do better. I haven't actually found any such assurance yet but I won't rule it out, either.

[devolve]

.

Chu has a US Taxpayer’s Caddy

Chu’s wife has a Mercedes

Chu claims he only owns a bicycle

.

[crosshairs]

Are the Bears Catholic?
Does the Pope,,,,,

[lentulusgracchus]

The persistence of the term "rule" within the nomenclatura .....

Think that should be spelt with a "k", Bill -- it's a loaner from Russian, like dezinformatsiya (disinformation), and a whole lot of other cool, blood-soaked political words from the 20th century.

[Billthedrill]

Correct you are, and a very interesting word it is, too. It is a reminder of where the notion came from that control of language confers control of thought.

That also explains why the spell checker kicked it out. :-)

[RipSawyer]

Is The Obama Cabinet Working Against America’s Interest?
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Uh, does the Sun still rise in the East?

[RipSawyer]

Comment: Some say maliciously
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Well they can’t be doing it out of stupidity as some say because stupid people get something right occasionally by accident. It takes real knowledge and intent to be wrong every stinking time about everything. You can’t make a zero on a test of 100 questions with multiple choice answers unless you know enough about the subject to make a perfect score if you want to.

[lentulusgracchus]

I got it from Hedrick "Rick" Smith, who was The New York Times's man in Moscow in the 80's. He wrote The Russians and used "nomenklatura" a lot, since their privileges so stamped Moscow daily life. Like the special, middle-of-the-road 80-mph fast lane it was worth your life to walk across if there were a big limousine coming.

[lentulusgracchus]

Oh, and both nomenklatura and dezinformatsiya would be refused by spell-checkers since they're Russian words used as calques in English. Rick Smith always italicized the Russian words he was using as foreign words. Nochalstvo, I think, was another one he used a lot -- also means "the bosses", the "bosserati", the "bossate" -- and the translators of Sozhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago used a number of the Russian terms Sozhenitsyn used for the KGB: osobisti, for example, but again as calques because no English word existed which would serve as an exact translation without periphrasis.