Picture that you have two months left on your interim job, and you still have to step down. Bon voyage, Anita Dunn:

The White House on Tuesday shook up its communications team, with Anita Dunn stepping down and an aide taking over President Obama’s vaunted messaging machine.

Dan Pfeiffer will become White House communications director and Dunn will became an outside adviser to Obama’s White House, officials said. They expect the full transition to take place before the end of the year.

That’s how the White House “shakes up” a team. (Maybe we can also shake Janet Napolitano out of a delusion of Muslim backlash.) It was Dunn’s own communications that made her even more of an embarrassment to the administration, from stating that they controlled the media to calling Fox News a wing of the Republican Party, and finally to when she referred to mass murderer Mao Zedong as one of her two favourite philosophers. (She later referred to this as “a joke.” You all remember when Tony Snow joked about how much opposition Hitler had in Berlin, right?) She also had a hand in training Robert Gibbs, who is about as charming and trustworthy as the PC in the “Mac vs. PC” ads, as well as bearing a striking resemblance.

I suppose deciding you are going to single out a news organization–if you can call it that–isn’t specifically violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution. It seems that there are a few accusations of some anti-Fox strong-arming coming from the White House:

At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration.

Pat Caddell, one of the few liberals on TV that seems credible, would not lie about something like this. Dunn is already on record as wanting to control what is said to the media and that Fox News is not a real news organization. Are we supposed to have believed her?

Meanwhile, all the fuss about getting a new appointee as soon as possible in the communications department, but other positions seem to be vacant:

Nearly 200 top jobs in the administration remain vacant a year after Obama began planning his ascension to power, the result of stalled nominations, new ethics rules, lengthy background checks and delays in Senate confirmations. More than half the vacancies are at five departments: Justice, State, Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security.

Like anyone at Customs and Border Protection in the Obama Administration has a hope and a prayer of getting any serious work done.

“Those are pretty significant policy jobs, and ones that the public ought to be concerned about,” says New York University professor Paul Light, an expert on the federal bureaucracy. “Obama is well on pace right now to set a new record in terms of lateness.”

Hey, man. CPT…Coloured President’s Time. They’re also attempting to blame this on Republican stalling tactics, which is laughable considering the diminished number of Congressional Republicans in key positions now. They also blame our impossibly high standards:

“The bar gets set by a combination of political pressure, media pressure, outside interest group pressure,” says Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf. “You can’t create a standard that people who live normal lives … can’t meet.”

Yes, I can’t tell you how many people I know who have cheated on paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes or used political leverage to get a lucrative government contract. Tim Geithner failed to pay $34,000 in taxes and is still Secretary of the Treasury! It would be like appointing someone to Secretary of the Interior who starts forest fires. Even Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle would not have held up to scrutiny.

But the deflection about Obama’s own sense of moral fortitude is just too much:

Ethics rules instituted by Obama prohibit lobbyists from working on issues they promoted or at agencies they lobbied during the previous two years. The rules also forbid them from lobbying the administration after they leave.

Tom Vilsack and Gary Locke were lawyers handling work for the government, and Eric Holder was a registered lobbyist. Susan Rice worked for the Brookings Institution before the two year limit (I do consider a “think tank” nothing more than a lobbying group), and Ron Kirk was a lobbyist right up until his appointment. Hilda Solis might be the very first person who lobbied herself.

And for the record, many of Obama’s selections for Cabinet posts were voted for unanimously by Senate Confirmations. So much for stalwart Republicans.

People assume that Anita Dunn is just a symptom of a larger group, but personally I think she stands head above shoulders over all of these other people. She’s the rare person affiliated with President Obama who really says  whatever is on her mind, which is invaluable for anyone attempting to grasp what is the essence of the brand-new Democratic Party. She believes that the media are the ones hurting America, and that clamping down on certain news outlets is a healthy exercise in democracy. Looking at the suits handled by her husband’s law firm, Perkins Coie, they have litigated to get Washington Governor Christine Gregoire and Minnesota Senator Al Franken elected in obviously fraudulent election results. He also defended Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver. So it isn’t as if she’s pretending with any of us. Rubbing our noses in it is far more apt an expression.

So thanks for telling us what you felt we needed to know all of these years, Anita. But don’t worry–we know you were just kidding about the Mother Teresa thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Barack Hussein Obama (PBUH). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.