by William Skink

While it might seem like I’ve always disdained the Obama regime, there was actually a period before the election in 2008 where I suspended my disbelief and allowed the hopium to fire my synapses with cautious optimism. I even teared up a little when Obama spoke on campus.

I remember precisely when the disappointment hit, followed quickly by the realization that the potential for change was nothing more than a slick ad campaign: the cabinet appointments, specifically little Timmy G., the sniveling twat who got Treasury.

With wikileaks email dumps coming fast and furious, I fully agree with the New Republic’s framing of the revelations: the most important one doesn’t have anything to do with Hillary:

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

So how do these lists stack up to who got the job? The article goes on:

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that.

Democrats should be outraged over this. At the highest level of the party, bankers were calling the shots, placing their preferred women and non-whites (identity politics!) in prominent positions of power. And boy, did it work out for them.

Now that the curtain has been torn open, we can see how nearly every dark suspicion of corruption and deceit has been confirmed. Pay to play? Yep. Media collusion with the Clinton campaign? Absolutely (you understand why I had to use Fox, right?). Privately (and explicitly) acknowledging our “allies” support ISIS terrorists while publicly supporting those same allies? Why the fuck not, worked great in the 80’s with Afghanistan, didn’t it?

There is so much more, and probably more to come, but the next Trump tape will be the focus when it comes out.

And that’s too bad, because there needs to be a serious reckoning for Democrats as all this ugly shit gets dragged into the light of day.

Thank you Wikileaks! The truth may hurt, but how can we expect anything to change if we don’t know how deep the rot has grown in DC?