I am so sick of seeing political operatives using Karl Rove style spin to defend Obama's conservative appointees and Republican policy positions on avoiding a windfall profits tax for Big Oil, on continuing the endless war on Iraq, on keeping the rich from paying anywhere near their fair share in taxes, and on other important matters.

Hildebrand's Huffington Post nonsense shows why I've lost all trust and respect for the Obama administration, and they haven't even taken office yet. Look at this garbage:

I could go on and on. The point I'm making here is that our new president, the Congress and all Americans must come together to solve these problems. This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren't progressive enough. Having worked with former Senator Obama for the last two years, I can tell you, that isn't the way he thinks and it's not likely the way he will lead. The problems I mentioned above and the many I didn't, suggest that our president surround himself with the most qualified people to address these challenges. After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people - not just those on the left.

This nonsense insults peoples' intelligence for a variety of reasons.

1) Executive Branch Appointments Matter
Executive branch appointees make an enormous amount of policy decisions that don't make the nightly news, but which cumulatively have a huge effect on peoples' lives. With the Obama administration already loaded up with so many rightist nutjobs, many people will suffer needlessly. Some people literally will die needlessly.

2) Liberals Gave Bill Clinton a Chance:
Does Hildebrand think liberals suffer from historical amnesia? During the transition and early in the Clinton administration, liberals were bombarded with bullshit from Clinton operatives about how we had to "give him a chance." He took that chance to govern like a rightist Reagan/Bush Republican. We have been betrayed just as badly by Phonycrats like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Any liberal who trusts a Democrat who starts governing from the right should be ashamed.

3) It's Never Premature for People to Call for the Government to Address Their Grievances.
In a democracy, people don't wait for permission from an authority figure, even one as minor as Hildebrand, to speak out. Those appointments belong to the people even more than they belong to Barack Obama. We have a right to say "no" when they represent the same administrations and interests that got our country into this terrible mess.

4) These Aren't the Most Qualified People
Let's look at this cast of losers and Clinton/Bush retreads. Robert Gates is a Bush family crony whose only "accomplishment" as Defense Secretary was repeatedly lying to the American people about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton has very few qualifications to serve in any administration. She is just trading on her husband's name in much the same way that another empty suit in New York politics, Andrew Cuomo, has built a career on trading on his father's name. Nepotism and cronyism are not change you can believe in.

What the fuck is Larry Summers doing as Obama's senior economic adviser? The man is an arrogant, incompetent ignoramus on almost everything, and this description is especially apt in the field of economics. Summers' push for financial deregulation and corrupt, corporate trade deals like NAFTA make him one of the people most personally responsible for the Crash of 2008 and our horrible recession. These are the most glaring examples of a set of appointees who are neither qualified or even interested in taking the kinds of actions that will get us out our mess.

5) Where Is an Openly Queer Cabinet Appointee?
On of the ways that Bill Clinton discriminated against the queer community was by not appointing even one openly queer Cabinet member during his entire administration. So far, Obama is heading in the same bigoted direction.

If Rovian bs is all that liberals are going to get from the Obama administration, we need to wake up. So far, Obama has worked to continue the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush policies of the last 28 years. Obama is getting less like FDR and more like Herbert Hoover every day.

There is no way I can ever take anything Steve Hildebrand says seriously after this. What a hack.