My Friends, My G________ Friends!

“I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights!” Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding serves in so many ways as the template for the current presidency. He served a short time in the Ohio state senate, then the US Senate. Prior to that he edited a small town newspaper and helped the Ohio Republican machine. The GOP ran him because he was attractive and sounded very good speaking about nothing. He hinged his campaign on the word "normalcy" and defeated james Cox and the Democrats. Harding then went on to failures that still did not reach the level of the neophyte Obama The reason for this was that perhaps because deapite all his failings, Harding still believed in hands off government. He did not give himself a chance to screw up too badly. Obama, meanwhile, believes in interventionism on a Mussoliniesque level.

Both Obama and Harding had friends to worry about. They both dragged the flotsam and jetsom of their own local and state political machines to Washington with them. Harding's friends tried to leverage illegal profit out of the system while Obama's simply want the power to enact their kooky ideas. Both men found themselves embarassed time and time again because they appointed men to influence with embarassing predilections.

Obama recently appointed a man as "safe schools czar" who admittedly in a published book encouraged a fifteen year old boy to have sex with an older man in a bus station. Many (not all of, but many of) Obama's biggest Hollywood supporters line up to denounce the arrest and imprisonment of Roman Polanski who drugged and sodomized a 7th grade girl. They feel that his status as an artist raises him above the law. I rarely agree with Chris Rock on anything, but he made a good point when he said that not even Johnny Cochran would defend OJ by saying "did you see him play for the Bills?"

Most of Obama's appointees as czars have shady pasts of some sort; that is why they were not sent to the Senate as choices for real executive branch posts. However, his lack of concern for their opinions and actions have come back to convince many that we are one year into a chaotic and incompetent presidency.