Here’s Bill Kristol on Joe Biden’s queer historical revisionism:

Vice President Biden — who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and who then argued that the surge could never work before he decided (in retrospect) that it did — said this to Larry King on Wednesday night:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Iraq is “one of the great achievements of this administration”? Well, any port in a political storm — even if it means taking credit for the success of policies of the previous administration, policies you opposed. In politics, after all, success acquires many fathers. And that’s fine, if it means the Obama administration is careful over the next couple of years not to toss away American troops’ achievements in Iraq.

President-elect Obama’s transition team is promising that its $700 billion, or $850 billion, or $1 trillion, or whatever it now is “stimulus” won’t include pork-barrel spending. They must not have talked to the nation’s mayors, who recently responded to Mr. Obama’s request to compile their priority list of “shovel-ready” projects.

By all accounts, the $73 billion wish list may be the largest collection of parochial spending projects in American history. Strolling through the 800 pages, we found such beauties as: $1 million to upgrade the Los Angeles County Convention Center elevated “catwalk” for cameras and lighting; $350,000 for an Albuquerque, N.M., fitness center; $94 million for a parking garage at the Orange Bowl in Miami; $4.5 million for Gretna, Florida, to bottle water with recyclable bottles; a $35 million music hall of fame in Florissant, Missouri, and $3.1 million for a swimming pool in Tulsa.
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Oh, and desperate Santa Barbara, Calif., respectfully requests $80,000 for a tennis facility; Savannah, Georgia, would like to build a children’s museum; Ventura, Calif., wants $6 million to renovate the beach at Surfers Point, and Durham, N.C., home of the Durham Bulls, wants to construct the first Minor League Baseball Hall of Fame. Dayton, Ohio, wants $1.5 million to reduce prostitution with education programs, and Ponce, Puerto Rico wants $5.7 million to improve its cruise ship terminal (which will create all of 60 jobs). We could go on.

No doubt some of these proposals would enhance urban life, but then why can’t the cities build them with their own money? Perhaps because the projects don’t really measure up against more urgent local priorities. But when the federal taxpayer does the financing, everything suddenly becomes affordable. If Durham wants a tourist destination, how about hitting up Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who did so well by the film “Bull Durham”?

The other truth about most of these projects is that they don’t come close to representing an economic “stimulus.” They may put a few people to work for a while, albeit while taking money out of the private economy to pay for them.

– Wall Street Journal.

The hard left is angry about Barack Obama’s decision to let Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren perform his inaugeration. But Charles Krauthammer is not fooled by Barack Obama’s apparant centrist manuvers.

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector “partner.” The first hint came yesterday, when Obama claimed, “If we want to overcome our economic challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge” — the perfect non sequitur that gives carte blanche to whatever health-care reform and spending the Obama team dreams up. It is the community organizer’s ultimate dream.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don’t be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn’t get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats — self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years — explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him — and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic “culture of corruption” storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end.

– Jonah Goldberg.

The largest union in the U.S., with more than 3.1 million members, is the teachers union, less known to the public by it’s proper name, the National Education Association (NEA).

In 2007 alone, the NEA spent more than $32 million on political lobbying, and more than $80 million on contributions almost exclusively to left-wing activist groups and non-educational causes like the Democratic Leadership Council, Democratic GAIN, National Council of La Raza, and even the now nefarious ACORN. According to John Berthoud, “Between 1990 and 2002, 95% of NEA candidate and party donations went to Democrats.”

That’s quite the stranglehold, eh?

Beyond totally undermining the media-promoted perception that lobbying is perpetrated mainly by corporations or right-wing enterprises — indeed, of the top 20 all-time lobbyists, only 3 at the bottom tilt their contributions to Republican representatives, most lean heavily towards Democrats — these facts explain how Democrats can be so brazen in their opposition to school choice while practicing it for their own children.

[Wall Street Journal] Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington’s elite.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s grandchildren attend Sidwell — as did Chelsea Clinton — where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. “A number of great schools were considered,” said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. “In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now.”

Note the word “selected,” as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington’s public schools are among the worst in America.

Most D.C. parents would also love to be able to choose a better school for their child, but they lack the financial means to do so. The Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program each year offers up to $7,500 to some 1,900 kids to attend private schools, but Democrats in Congress want to kill it. Average family income for kids in the voucher program is about $22,000.

Mr. Obama says he opposes such vouchers, because “although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom.” The example of his own children refutes that: The current system offers plenty of choice to kids “at the top” while abandoning those at the bottom.

Jonah Goldberg adds the hypocrisy isn’t the issue, rather, “The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful [public] schools at all… The Democratic Party continues to tolerate this sort of thing because public school teachers continue to be reliably liberal voters. And their unions cut big checks.”

“Citi never sleeps,” says the bank’s advertising slogan. But its directors apparently do. While CEO Vikram Pandit can argue that many of Citi’s problems were created before he arrived in 2007, most board members have no such excuse. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has served on the Citi board for a decade. For much of that time he was chairman of the executive committee, collecting tens of millions to massage the Beltway crowd, though apparently not for asking tough questions about risk management.

The writers at the Deal Journal blog remind us of one particularly egregious massaging, when Mr. Rubin tried to use political muscle to prop up Enron, a valued Citi client. Mr. Rubin asked a Treasury official to lean on credit-rating agencies to maintain a more positive rating than Enron deserved. What signal will President-elect Barack Obama send if his Administration, populated with Mr. Rubin’s protégés, allows this uberfixer to continue flying hither and yon on the corporate jet while taxpayers foot the bill?

– Wall Street Journal.

We just learned this week that CitiBank was one of the four failed banks that paid Bill Clinton “$2.1 million for 13 speeches he delivered on their behalf between 2004-2007.” So, in effect, your tax dollars from the bailout go in part to Bill & Hillary Clinton.

Ain’t life grand!

Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s idea of “change,” is to fill his cabinet with former Clinton administration people, the very same people who created this Fannie/Freddie-Community Reinvestment Act nightmare.

A few points:

• It really gets funny about 5 minutes into it.
• Voter Erika was by far the most sensible, and bubbly cute. The rest were morons… Albeit, PBS-/NPR-/New York Times-educated morons.
• Along those lines, it really underscores the power of the mainstream media, no matter how archaic conventional wisdom says they’ve become in our Internet age.
• The media really, really hated Sarah Palin, and that hatred — through the engine of perpetual negative coverage of her — really, really permeated to the public.
• That somebody actually made that ‘drink every drop of the Kool-Aid’, chanting “O-Bam-A” song is quite disturbing.

Funny, but I recall the legions of Obamamessiah backers claiming that an Obama-Clinton ticket would undermine his image of bringing “change” to Washington; “New Politics” and all that recycled junk.

Low and behold, “Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices.” That includes, of course, Rahm Emanuel, and possibly (probably) now a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This is change?

Throw in the name Gregory Craig as White House Chief Counsel. Craig’s resume?

In the early 1980s, [Craig] was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley’s acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. …

Craig orchestrated a 1984 [Senate] hearing for Kennedy on alleged human-rights abuses committed by Nicaragua’s rebels, the Contras. He worked with groups closely tied to the Sandinista regime to find witnesses for the forum, which led to a round of anti-contra news coverage in the U.S. Soon afterward, however, Joshua Muravchik, currently of the American Enterprise Institute, exposed a fraud: The most compelling witnesses — three Miskito Indians — had been served up by the Sandinistas.

And a fourth participant, Father Alfredo Gundrum, an American priest living in Nicaragua, had been asked to play the role of honest broker — to place the testimony “into some kind of perspective,” as Kennedy put it. Gundrum, described as “totally apolitical” in background material distributed by Kennedy’s staff, told of how the Contras launched vicious raids on Indian villages “almost every day.” Yet Gundrum had been the subject of a San Francisco newspaper article just one month before the hearing. He was photographed standing before his church with a Soviet-made rifle in his hands and quoted as saying, “To me it was a day of grace the day the Sandinistas took over, and I really mean it.”

Craig is even tied to the Elian Gonzalez case.

Of course, a lot of people on the Left think going back to the 1990s would be great.

Maybe, but I guess it depends how you remember the 1990s. For instance, maybe you remember the IT boom. Then again, maybe you remember the peace that never was.

[Washington Post] “OBAMAISM — It’s a Kind of Religion,” says New York magazine. “Those of us too young to have known JFK’s Camelot are going to have our own giddy Camelot II to enrapture and entertain us,” Kurt Andersen writes. The New York Post has already christened it “BAM-A-LOT.”

“Here we are,” writes Salon’s Rebecca Traister, “oohing and aahing over what they’ll be wearing, and what they’ll be eating, what kind of dog they’ll be getting, what bedrooms they’ll be living in, and what schools they’ll be attending. It feels better than good to sniff and snurfle through the Obamas’ tastes and habits. . . . Who knew we had in us the capacity to fall for this kind of idealized Americana again?”

But aren’t media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?

“Obama is a figure, especially in pop culture, in a way that most new presidents are not,” historian Michael Beschloss says. “Young people who may not be interested in the details of NAFTA or foreign policy just think Obama is cool, and they’re interested in him. Being cool can really help a new president.”

So can a sense of optimism, reflected on USA Today’s front page. “Poll: Hopes soaring for Obama, administration,” the headline said, with 65 percent saying “the USA will be better off 4 years from now.”

But what happens when adulation gives way to the messy, incremental process of governing? When Obama has to confront a deep-rooted financial crisis, two wars and a political system whose default setting is gridlock? When he makes decisions that inevitably disappoint some of his boosters?

“We’re celebrating a moment as much as a man, I think,” says Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham, whose new issue, out today, compares Obama to Lincoln. “Given our racial history, an hour or two of commemoration seems appropriate. But there is no doubt that the glow of the moment will fade, and I am sure the coverage will reflect that in due course.”

That media types are already comparing Obama, before his first day in office, to what polls generally show as the most or second most (behind George Washington) accomplished president ever really says all you’ll ever need to know about media slant and bias.

And yeah, but um, Lincoln wasn’t really celebrated until the years following his assassination. That is, he actually had to do something first, and then die because of it.

While Lincoln was president, the nation was hotly divided, and not just among North and South, but Northern Democrats versus Northern Republicans. Lincoln’s head general, George McClellan, would call Lincoln, “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon”, a “gorilla”, and “ever unworthy of … his high position.” Many Northern newspapers, columnists and orators of that day, particularly from the Anti-War Copperheads, publicly and vociferously vilified Abraham Lincoln in terminology similar to that of George Bush today — tyrant, shedder of the Constitution, and so on.

[Ed Morrissey] Now ABC reports that Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, sat on the board of Freddie Mac during the critical period:

President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) (click here to read) of having “failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.”

Emanuel’s action, or lack of it, came during a time when the SEC says Freddie Mac misrepresented its income to investors in order to maintain its price.  In other words, they committed fraud.  The SEC specifically notes that Freddie did this in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and Emanuel sat on the board in 2000-2001.

This is no small matter.  Had this happened when Sarbanes-Oxley was in effect, Emanuel would have had to sign off on those numbers under penalty of perjury.  He could be liable for criminal prosecution.  As it is, his actions and omissions as a board member may still result in civil and criminal liability, if the SEC discovers that he had a hand in the fraud committed at Freddie Mac, or if Emanuel knew about it and failed to act to stop it.

For an incoming administration that ran on cleaning up the greed on Wall Street, the selection of Emanuel speaks a lot louder than any campaign promises.  One might think that anyone who sat on the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while the two GSEs cooked the books and set the stage for global financial collapse should at least be considered political poison for any appointment, let alone one as significant as White House Chief of Staff — if nothing else, then at least on the basis of competence.  Instead, it looks like Obama is bringing the Chicago Way to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Hope and change, indeed.