Samantha Power--Obama's New Sec of State?

You know, maybe O's administration just floats these trial balloons to make people crazy, I don't know. But the newest thing out there is that this woman, Samantha Power, is going to be nominated as Big Zero's Secretary of State. Oh why not? The U.S. is the laughing stock of the world at this point anyway, so what could it possibly matter?

Who is Samantha Power? Glad you asked. You remember her, right? She was the Obama campaign advisor who called Hillary Clinton a "monster." She was allowed to "resign" after those remarks which were published in a Scottish newspaper, despite her efforts to keep the remarks from appearing in print. Demonstrating her diplomatic skills, Power said, "She's a monster, too--that is off the record--she is stooping to anything." Quite the diplomat, our Samantha. She sounds like the perfect face for the Obama adminstration to negotiate the U.S. position around the world.

Now it seems as if she's also the one to whom Obama outsourced the decision to go to Libya. Huh? Evidently our involvement in Libya is a trendy new concept among foreign policy wonk-elites like Power called Responsibility to Protect (or preciously, R2P). According to Ed Lasky in his article about Power at American Thinker, "The Power of Samantha Power," her opinion "eclipsed the views" of her boss, Nat'l Security Advisor Tom Donlin and also of O-Bomb-A's Defense Sec. As Lasky says, we shouldn't be surprised at Powe's influence with The Won, since he consistently has made a mockery of the concept of the org chart throughout his executive branch, with the appointment of his Czars and recess appointments who do an end-around the advice and consent of the Senate. But I don't know how you can do a "do-around" with the position of Sec State. We'll see, they must have something in mind, because surely the Senate would't confirm this woman, would they?

One reason for believing this nomination is really going to happen is that The NYT has published a very approving profile of Ms. Power: "Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside." She spoke at Columbia University last Monday night, just hours before O-Bomb-A addressed the nation about his incoherent plans for Libya: “I’m not going to talk much about Libya,” she began, though when it came time for questions she could not help herself. “Our best judgment,” she said, defending the decision to establish a no-fly zone to prevent atrocities, was that failure to do so would have been “extremely chilling, deadly and indeed a stain on our collective conscience.” The Times goes on...That the president used almost precisely the same language was hardly a surprise. Great. So Zero is not only outsourcing his military leadership to NATO and the UN, he's also outsourcing his military decisions to a 40-something radical with--what experience to make that sort of decision, exactly???

It's also at Obama's Paper of Record (TM) that we find out who this woman is and what she "believes" (I put "believes" into scare quotes because I think it's pretty clear that to be part of Barry's administration, you can't really "believe" anything--ask Eric Holder about that one). She's called a "human rights crusader," and is a member of the National Security Council which advises The Won on foreign policy. (Other members of Big Zero's security council are here.) The NYT calls Obama's decision to pursue military intervention in Libya "something of a personal triumph for her." Isn't it a bit early to call Libya anyone's "triumph"? Just askin'. The Times tells us, alternately, that Ms. Power was a "vocal opponent" of the Iraq war. Well, then, her anti-war creds are solid.

Stanley Kurtz has an article about Power posted April 5 at the National Review Online: "Samantha Power's Power" where he says that when we view the full sweep of her life's work, Samantha Power emerges as "a patriot's nightmare--a woman determined to subordinate America's national sovereignty to an international order largely controlled by leftist bureaucrats." While her stated public goal ("superficial" goal, Kurtz says) is to put a stop to genocide, in reality, "her goal is to use our shared horror at the worst that human beings can do in order to institute an ever-broadening regime of redistributive transnational governance."

The article is a must-read. Kurtz spells out in detail the long-time influence this woman has had on Obama's thinking about foreign policy. For example, it's fascinating to note that a 2007 piece by Power in The New York Times Book Review attacked the phrase "War on Terror," which of course the Obama administration has since dropped. Kurtz also details how Power's framing of the issue of "interest-based" rationalizations for intervention (I'm sure she would never use the word "war") has been adopted wholesale by Obama.

Kurtz further states that Power's eagerness for a humanitarian showcase has led us to intervene in what is really a tribal war. Her outlook is "post-American"--read further in the article for the details on that. "Power sees herself as a clever sort of radical who works from within established institutions, without ever really sacrificing her rebellious ideals." He quotes Tom Hayden as saying that Power's "originality" was "to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values."

Kurtz says that Power has a lot to teach us about Barack Obama: "She herself draws analogies between the need to redistribute wealth via health-care coverage and the need to divide military and diplomatic power (and implicitly, wealth) more evenly through the international system."

Kurtz says that one of Power's longstanding goals (which she now disavows) is to impose a "two-state solution" on Israel. She has also been a long-time defender of the International Criminal Court, which if she has her way, it sounds as if she would happily help to enlist leftist Europeans to place American soldiers and politicians (Bush/Cheney) on trial for supposed war crimes.

And oh, did I mention, Samantha is married to--Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama's "regulatory czar"--dubbed by Esquire magazine as "The Fun Couple of the 21st Century." Oh for the love of God. Here's the darling little fun power couple themselves. Don't they look--fun?

Kinda "fun" in the same way that Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are fun. You remember our friend Cass. He's the one who thinks that bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them. What should be of no particular surprise to anyone is that all his own records, like transcripts at Columbia, his senior thesis on Soviet Nuclear disarmament, and records from his time in the Illinois state senate have mysteriously "disappeared" (sort of exactly like those of his boss). God knows what this man is really doing behind the curtain in his position as Obama's thought-control Czar. Fun power couple, indeed.