Forget the Honeymoon
Not a mandate for more wars
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
DIGG THIS
 When
I hear talk of a "honeymoon"
for the President-elect – to last as long as six
months, by some accounts – I think: "Fine. You lay
off, and I'll do the same." But oh no, it doesn't work that
way. Obama has already started in on us, and he hasn't even taken
the oath of office yet. I'm talking about his appointments, starting
with Rahm
Emanuel as his chief of staff.
Hey, I thought
we were gong to be treated to a bipartisan approach by the Obama
administration, that he was going to "reach across the aisle"
– what happened to that? Señor Emanuel is known
as a street-fightin' Democrat, and that's understating it. A Rolling
Stone profile
of Emanuel had this to say:
"There's
the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel
was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a
celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed
a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting
'Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!' and plunging the knife into the
table after every name. 'When he was done, the table looked like
a lunar landscape,' one campaign veteran recalls. 'It was like
something out of The Godfather.'"
He's mean,
he's ultra-partisan, and he's a fully-paid up member in good standing
of the War Party: during the Democratic primaries in 2006, when
Emanuel headed up the Dems' congressional operation, he backed
pro-war candidates over antiwar Democrats every time. As Bill
Safire put it on "Meet the Press" just before Tim
Russert died:
"What
about Rahm Emanuel [for Vice President], the most powerful voice
in the House of Representatives that agrees with Hillary Clinton
on foreign affairs? He's a hawk. And although he's a rootin' tootin'
liberal on domestic affairs, he is a hawk on foreign affairs.
I was at the – a roast for him for Epilepsy Association,
and Hillary Clinton was there, and I said, quite frankly, here
you have the hawkish side of the Democratic Party. If they get
together, the bumper sticker will read 'Invade and bomb with Hillary
and Rahm.'"
When the House
Democratic majority passed a military appropriations bill slated
for Iraq, a clause that would have prohibited an attack on Iran
without a vote in Congress was deleted
at the instigation
of Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When Rep. John Murtha
presaged the popular rebellion against the Iraq war by coming out
against it in no uncertain terms, Emanuel urged
Pelosi to refrain from endorsing his call for withdrawal, arguing
that it would hurt the Democrats politically.
Read
the rest of the article
November
8, 2008
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2008 Antiwar.com
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