Birds of a feather

There are two nominations being discussed now for important posts in the Obama Administration. For a supposedly smart guy, it’s hard to imagine how on earth he could want two utter incompetents to join him in what must be a lonely second term. But such is the perverse logic of our current political culture that Lawrence Sommers, a failed gambler, and Ray Kelly, a racist asshole, should be angling for top jobs.

Let’s start with the execreable Sommers, who is most famous for saying that women aren’t very good at math and science (now being discussed as a possible replacement for Bernanke at the Federal Reserve). This surreal statement wasn’t enough to send him packing to a remote mountain cave for life, but as this post by Yves Smith details at length, there were many previous reasons to dislike the guy especially for his colleagues at Harvard University, where he was president.

Sommers ignored all expert advice on investing the multi-billion-dollar Harvard endowment by people with a proven track record and insisted on getting his mitts on the dough directly. He proceeded to blow through $2 billion of it before being bounced, providing many juicy commissions for his Wall Street buddies. Obama then rewarded him with an influential position in Washington. This should tell us something important about Obama, but remarkably few people have got the message.

Kelly is our police chief here in New York, responsible for the radical criminalization of all black and Hispanic males, especially those roughly around Trayvon Martin’s age. He persecutes dissidents, bullies the elected politicians and generally acts like the head enforcer for an East European politburo. The Murdoch press loves him and is promoting him to be the next head of Homeland Security. Here are all the reasons why that should not happen.

Obama may not appoint either of these goons, but he hasn’t dismissed the idea—quite contrary. If he and his gang feared popular disgust as they briefly did during the Occupy heyday, they wouldn’t dare.

I’m too weary to argue with people who think the problem facing our nation is the bad old Republicans, who admittedly are losing their few remaining marbles by the minute. That’s true enough, and yes, they represent domestic fascism in the bud. But with these two corrupt and loathsome elements representing the alternative, anyone still thinking the Democrats offer some sort of credible answer is almost equally cuckoo.