Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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This President Stuff is Pretty Tough

Friday December 19, 2008

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Memo to President-elect Obama: Your most ardent supporters on the Left will turn on you in a heartbeat if they detect you are straying from their orthodoxy.

How do I know this? Same thing happened to President Bush - both Presidents Bush - when the Right thought they were straying on things like taxes (41) and immigration (43).

The latest example is the selection by Mr. Obama of Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration on January 20.

Rick Warren is well-known as being anti-gay (officially, that is anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender - LGBT for those in the know). As if that weren't enough, he is also on record (and in books) as being ardently pro-life.

Yikes! How many nominees to the President's cabinet and White House staff will resign in protest over Rev. Warren being invited, do you think?

None, would be the answer to that. Although if Hillary Clinton is concerned that her Senate seat will be handed - HANDED - to Caroline Kennedy who, along with her uncle Ted, endorsed Obama relatively early in the primary season she might decline to be Secretary of State to (a) show her opposition to Rev. Warren and, at the same time, block Caroline Kennedy from being handed - HANDED - a ticket to the United States Senate.

The feminist Left has already had to swallow its opposition to Larry Summers who has been named by Mr. Obama to head up the National Economic Council in the WH. Summers, you may remember, got bounced as the President of Harvard for pointing out, as the left-leaning Nation magazine put it, "women's genetic inferiority in math and science."

According to a Washington Post article in today's editions by Jacqueline Salmon and Peter Slevin,

"Rev. Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life has sold 40 million copies, six times as many as Obama's three books combined."

Warren was, as another writer in today's Post, Joe Solmonese, put it

"a general in the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8, which dissolved the legal marriage rights of loving, committed same-sex couples."

Sarah Posner, writing in the Nation magazine lists Warren's sins thus:

"Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

The Obama folks point out that the closing prayer will be delivered by Rev. Joseph Lowery who helped start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - hardly a right-wing group no matter where on the political continuum you find yourself standing.

Earlier this week, Mr. Obama nominated Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo) to be Interior Secretary. Sen. Salazar is on record as being for drilling off the coast of Florida and, according to the San Francisco Chronicle,

"has also been criticized for expressing opposition while he was Colorado attorney general in 1999 to the listing of the black-tailed prairie dog under the Endangered Species Act."

What. Is. Obama. Thinking?

There are people sitting at their computers in Washington toting up how many Men, how many Women (transgenders, one presumes, are counted as half of each), Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics, Catholics, Protestants (Methodists and Episcopalians are lumped together), Jews, Hindus, Rastafarians, Ivy Leaguers, Big-Ten graduates, and so on.

Given the fact that Barack Obama won the election and won the election by a large, large margin, conservatives and moderates should be very, very happy with the way the President-elect is putting together his Administration.

It will be far more centrist than either the House or the Senate Democratic caucuses which may well lead to very interesting fights not between Republicans and Democrats in the Congress, but Democrats in the Congress v. Democrats in the Administration.

Meanwhile, the invitation of Rev. Warren to be the leadoff hitter at the Obama Inaugural will test the levels of political capital that Mr. Obama has amassed.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the WashPost and the Nation as well as a link to Rastafarians. Also a Mullfoto from NYC the other day and a Catchy Caption of the Day proving the existence of Global Warming.

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