Lest we forget

Today is supposed to be the day Obama names Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

One can't help but wonder exactly what it is about her counsel that he values so highly.

Perhaps it is her financial expertise. This is, after all, the woman who supposedly parlayed a $1000 stake into exactly $100,000 by trading cattle futures. (Tyson Chicken's man in the futures pit later said that he had been instructed to direct all of his winning trades to her account and all of his losing trades elsewhere at the end of the day till she had accumulated $100,000. But this was never proven.) Hillary herself testified that she had studied cattle futures trading by reading about it in the Wall Street Journal and had executed the trades herself. But if she had become so proficient at it, why did she quit after making exactly $100,000?

Perhaps he realizes that she is the sort of take-charge woman who will clean house at Foggy Bottom. After all, this is the woman responsible for Travelgate.

Perhaps it is because they agree about health care. After all, Hillary, with great fanfare and even greater secrecy, attempted the proposed nationalization of health care eary inher husband's first term.

Perhaps it is her loyalty. Even though Hillary originally claimed she wasn't some little Tammy Wynette-stand-by-your-man type, in fact she did exactly that by insisting that those who claimed her husband had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky were part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Pehaps it is her thriftiness. This is the woman who stole the White House china upon leaving that residence in January of 2000. (Note to Barack: please count the silver after those state dinners.)
Perhaps it's that her thinking about the Middle East has evolved the same way that Barack's did. Hillary was a big supporter of Palestinian rights until she decided to run for Senator from New York, at which point she suddenly became an ardent Zionist. Obama too was a Palestinian sympathizer until he won the primaries, at which point he delivered a speech to AIPAC which would have made Netanyahu blush.

Unlike Obama, of course, Hillary is an actual war hero. She claimed during the primaries, in order to polish her foreign policy cred, that she had had to "duck bullets on the tarmac" after landing in Bosnia one time. Later footage of this deplaning showed her smiling beneficently at some young girls who were lined up to greet her and present her with gifts.

Pehaps Barack was won over when Hillary burnished her street cred during the primaries by adopting a black accent while addressing the congregation at a black church.

Or maybe it's her flexibility. Later, in another setting, Hillary announced that Obama had no chance of winning the general election (essentially because he was black).

Or might it possibly be that this is a cynical move to forge political alliances, and to apply a little salve to that portion of the electorate who had wanted to see a woman in the White House? Might it be that he is obeying that old maxim about keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer? Might it be both?

The only thing certain about this choice is that for the foreseeable future at Foggy Bottom, Lady MacBeth will come first and the country will come in a distant second.