The rats are hopping off the decks of the B.H. Obama

The B.O. Obama Takes on Water

By Daniel Greenfield
Saturday, October 9, 2010

The rats are hopping off the decks of the B.H. Obama or being shoved off to lighten the ship’s load. Purges like this usually happen before or after a second term, not before a midterm election.

Bush’s first Chief of Staff, Andrew Card served for five years. Rice, Bush’s first National Security Adviser, held down the post for four years. But here the latest go to is National Security Adviser James L. Jones, once the top man on foreign policy, who seems to have fallen victim to the compulsive infighting among Obama associates.

As I have written in the past, Obama’s Czars and raft of new positions has created chaos and an unclear chain of command. Obama’s own unwillingness to take charge, has turned the administration into a snake pit where people with important titles vie against each other, to see who’s the top dog. And James L. Jones is clearly not the top dog. Not anymore.

Jones is being replaced by Thomas Donilon. A lot of people will focus on Donilon’s time as a registered lobbyist for Fannie Mae or his ties to Penny Pritzker, but none of this relates much to his actual duties.

Thomas Donilon is really Biden’s man. He’s worked for Biden in the past. His brother works for him. His wife is Biden’s Chief of Staff. If Donilon was any deeper in with Biden, he’d be married to him. Which means it’s good odds that Biden helped push out Jones. Biden’s supposed reason for being in his present job is his foreign policy expertise. Putting in Donilon let him have an oar in the water, now his oar just got a little bigger.

What does this mean for the rest of us, it’s hard to say. James L. Jones had clear Saudi ties. Donilon less so. But Donilon also seems to have been doing a lot of the day to day heavy lifting, rather than his boss. Which means not much may change. Donilon is a workload guy and willing to do most things for his bosses. He was tangentially involved in one the Clinton Administration’s file search scandals, when his staff assistant was caught raiding Bush Administration personnel files and passing around the contents. But there was no proven personal involvement by Donilon himself.

Donilon has plenty of experience on the political side of things, which is what is going to lead here. He’s more of a politician than a foreign policy wonk. That gives him more in common with Rahm Emanuel, than with Jones. But he’s also good at managing the bureaucracy, which Jones wasn’t. What this translates into, is Biden having him much more of a voice on foreign policy, and foreign policy being led by politics first.

When it comes to Israel, not all that much will change, except that the Anti-Israel policy will be more pragmatic, that is pressuring Israel to surrender to terrorists for political reasons, rather than out of hate or conflicts of interest. And we’ve already seen that shift happen before Jones actually left. Donilon won’t be anti-Israel for the reasons that an Obama or a James L. Jones was, but because Israel stands in the way of making Obama look good.

What is interesting though about people like Donilon or Rouse walking into the big jobs, is that these are the older hands, the people you expected to hold down jobs like this if Hillary Clinton or Biden had won. These are old line types who used to be commonplace, but got second shift in the Obama Administration. And now things are evening out again, and the radicals are losing.

This may be a temporary measure to restore Democratic party confidence in the Obama Administration, not by the shouty Netroots, but by the rank and file, who think this whole thing has gone off the rails. The presence of people like Donilon and Rouse is reassuring, suggesting that the party really hasn’t changed that much.

Unless you have status, you’re not likely to see or hear much about Donilon, but he will be having a major impact on the decisions that get made, and he’s likely to hang on to the inside track, because he knows how the system works.

The only real takeaway here is that Soros’s money could only buy so much. His organizations helped ram through Obama and are still covering his #####. They illegally bulled him through the primaries. But the old boys network in the Democratic party is squeezing them out. Because as much money as Soros has, the government and the Democratic party are a little too big to completely dominate. And now that Obama is cracking up, and his foreign and domestic policies championed by the radicals have gone up in smoke, there’s more appeal for steady hands, over radical academics and activists.

As bad as the Obama Administration is, the crackup would have been far worse without Ex-Clintonites like Rahm Emanuel, who had some understanding of real life, and knew that you couldn’t just run America like a Marxist dictatorship.

Over to Rick Sanchez, the non-story of the year. Sanchez’s prominence at CNN, like the Parker-Spitzer mess, testified mainly to CNN’s sinking ship.

Sanchez was a loudmouthed idiot. But when he attacked Jon Stewart, he made the mistake not of attacking “Jewsâ€