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“So we have a virus on the loose that turns your organs into liquid … “

“So we have a virus on the loose that turns your organs into liquid … “

… and the answer is to appoint a guy to do the messaging,” says Charles Krauthammer on choice of Ron Klain as Ebola Czar.

Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration was appointing partisan bureaucrat Ron Klain as Ebola Czar was met with partisan reactions. Liberals think it’s a great idea while conservatives are skeptical.

Perhaps no one put the situation in perspective better than Charles Krauthammer who, by being a psychiatrist is also a medical doctor and therefore more qualified for the position than Klain.

In an appearance on Special Report with Bret Baier, Krauthammer reduced the Klain appointment to what it actually is, a public relations move.

Transcript and video by National Review:

“I don’t think it’s going to make any difference one way or the other. . . . It gives the appearance of motion; this is what Obama specializes in. If you have a VA scandal, an IRS scandal, a Secret Service scandal, you fire the guy at the top so you have the appearance of motion; here you’re putting a guy in who’s supposedly going to coordinate.”

On Friday’s Special Report, Krauthammer derided Klain’s own assessment of his duties: “There’s a quote in the New York Times about what Klain would do, and he said his job is ‘messaging.’ So we have a virus on the loose that turns your organs into liquid, and the answer is to appoint a guy to do the messaging. . . .

Here’s something you probably haven’t heard about Ron Klain.

He was a key player in the Solyndra scandal.

Alex Griswold of the Daily Caller reported:

Ron Klain, the newly appointed White House Ebola response coordinator, was one of the senior White House officials who advised that President Obama should visit solar power company Solyndra in 2011, despite an auditor raising red flags about the company’s finances.

According to The Washington Post, Klain was one of the “key players” in the scandal while he worked for Vice President Joe Biden: “Ron Klain, then Biden’s chief of staff, dismissed auditor’s concerns about Solyndra’s solvency, reasoning that all innovative companies come with risk.”

Another Solyndra email, reported by Fox News, indicated that Biden’s office were all fans of Solyndra, and that the staff “about had an orgasm” at the prospect of an Energy Department loan.

Klain, a Democratic operative who also served as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, had a hand in pushing for President Obama’s visit to a Solyndra factory in California during the 2010 midterms. ”Sounds like there are some risk factors here — but that’s true of any innovative company that POTUS would visit,” Klain wrote in an email the day before. “It looks like it is OK to me, but if you feel otherwise, let me know.”

How sadly unsurprising.

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Comments

Richard Fernandez, I think, nails the “czar” concept in the era of the Obamic Decline…

“But there is in fact, a substantive difference. They are a parallel system of command. As suggested by this article in Western Journalism, their chief qualification is political adherence to the president’s ideology and personal loyalty to him. In fact it may be argued that they are not ‘czars’ in the sense of inter-agency enablers. It will probably be the role of Klain — like Cass Sunstein, Todd Stern, John Holdren, Mark Lloyd, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, etc — to make sure the bureaucracy knows who they are working for and for what ends. They’re not just ‘coordinators’ any more. They are a kind of enforcer. They work is better described by another Russian word: zampolit or political officer.”
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/10/18/dual-control/

Or…

Or Gauleiter. The whole concept is similar to the Nazi Gleichshaltung (trans: coordination) program, whereby government functions were brought under party control.

    Spiny Norman in reply to Ragspierre. | October 18, 2014 at 6:42 pm

    Fernandez is very perceptive. I’ve been a fan of his since he was commenting as “Wretchard” at LGF a dozen years ago.

      Ragspierre in reply to Spiny Norman. | October 18, 2014 at 6:56 pm

      He is also EXTREMELY well-read, and his excellent mind wonders far and afield, which is a treat to a global thinker (that is, non-logistical thinker) like mysef.

    Observer in reply to Ragspierre. | October 18, 2014 at 9:12 pm

    In which case they should be on the payroll of the Democratic party, not U.S. taxpayers.

    A political fixer. We can stay in the great beast belly of US political history. Every urban political machine had a few. See for example “Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series” by David Pietrusza. According to a recent interview on the John Batchelor Show, Pietrusza said Rothstein worked with Tammany Hall.

Joe Biden needs a Chief of Staff? REALLY? ROFLMBO!

Insufficiently Sensitive | October 19, 2014 at 12:30 pm

”Sounds like there are some risk factors here — but that’s true of any innovative company that POTUS would visit

Horse___t. Any company that this POTUS would visit would only be innovative in a political sense – innovating use and abuse of its political connections as insurance that any ‘risk’ in it product development and profitability would be passed, with no publicity, to the taxpayers for payment.

Ragspierre, Spiny Norman, huzza the both of you. It is a national travesty that Fernandez is not a syndicated columnist – he puts the existing ones to shame by his historical references and his perspectives. By comparison, the MSM competition are uneducated louts.