- If you consider Gates only "semi-competent", I'd be interested to know where you think he's messed up as SecDef, specifically?
- Powell was the guy who stood before the UN and testified that Iraq had WMD; he was the face put on the policy. How would his appointment not "validate the Bush Admin's failed policies" even more than keeping Gates around would?
- The whole thing is based the idea that SecDef needs to be a Democrat, regardless of how well Gates has actually done his job. While I'd expect Kos to make this argument, for now I take Obama at his word that he's not going to play that game. At the same time, there's certainly some Democratic options which would make sense (Sam Nunn), others that'd be abject disasters (Wes Clark), and others in the middle (Jim Webb). A good choice I'll certainly support, while a reflexive lets-get-a-Democrat-in-there-regardless choice less so.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 02:48 am (UTC)- Powell was the guy who stood before the UN and testified that Iraq had WMD; he was the face put on the policy. How would his appointment not "validate the Bush Admin's failed policies" even more than keeping Gates around would?
- The whole thing is based the idea that SecDef needs to be a Democrat, regardless of how well Gates has actually done his job. While I'd expect Kos to make this argument, for now I take Obama at his word that he's not going to play that game. At the same time, there's certainly some Democratic options which would make sense (Sam Nunn), others that'd be abject disasters (Wes Clark), and others in the middle (Jim Webb). A good choice I'll certainly support, while a reflexive lets-get-a-Democrat-in-there-regardless choice less so.
- Kos does tend to overestimate his own importance as a matter of self-preservation to keep the $$$ coming in (big surprise), but I regard his site as a canary-in-a-mineshaft for what the hard progressive side is thinking, just like LGF and RedState is for the hard right (Den Beste retired from political writing 3-4 years ago). Webtraffic is notoriously difficult to estimate, but the Wikipedia page for them cites "an average weekday traffic of about 519,000 visits,[1] and has between 14 million and 24 million visits per month." plus $1.4 million in campaign contributions raised during the 2006 campaign. Huffington said last year her site averages "3 million a month" by way of rough comparison. But on Alexa Kos is only ranked 3,164 among all websites in popularity, while HP is 560th and Sullivan is at 3,654. The metrics are, shall we say, less than precise on these things.