Obama’s Smear Machine Running Strong; Meanwhile…Geithner Still Has No Staff

The White House’s public priorities are seriously screwed up, having coordinated attacks on Rush Limbaugh with left-wing media, using the Rahmbo handbook. Politico reported late last week that the White House had quarterbacked “Operation Rushbo” as a means of demonizing Republicans, exactly the kind of political character assassination Barack Obama had campaigned against for the past two years. Today, the New York Times inadvertently confirmed the veracity of the story in a profile of Obama’s closest political adviser. David Axelrod gave the order to launch the attack machine. Today in the Times we have:

A glimpse of Axelrod’s day offers a look at how he spends his time.

He arrives at the White House shortly after 7 a.m., a torturously early hour for a man known during the campaign for sending messages until the small hours of the morning. A cup of Earl Grey tea is waiting for him — he hates the taste of coffee and recalls having only two cups in his life — as he walks into his first appointment of the day, a meeting in the office of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, who has been a friend for 25 years.

He attends the economic briefing in the Oval Office, where the latest news and grim statistics are relayed to the president by a battery of advisers. When the classified intelligence briefing begins, Axelrod leaves the room. Later, he and a speechwriter sit down with Obama to review the three-ring binder containing each speech or statement the president will make that day.

Often in the late afternoons, he walks to the Situation Room to attend some meetings of the National Security Council, stopping to grab a handful or two of the M&Ms that are in a large bowl outside the room.

He also helps decide which fights to pick and which ones to avoid, making him a leading voice in setting the political tone in Washington. The recent back-and-forth with Rush Limbaugh, for example, was explicitly authorized by Axelrod, who told aides that it was not a moment to sit quietly after Limbaugh said he hoped that Obama would “fail.”

Nothing new here…Obama’s lips are moving, Obama’s lying/breaking major campaign promises. The White House is out of control, the gypsies are ensconced in the Palace, and it’s dirty politics, on steroids, as usual. Barry is still flitting about campaigning…only his stump-stops are global now.

Treasury head Turbo-Tax Tim Geithner is still dog-paddling without a plan…or a staff. Braniac Tim, the ONLY MAN IN AMERICA (from Goldman Sachs) WHO CAN SAVE US is largely a lone-ranger right now. Treasury officials are also still scrambling to decide details of their plan to buy up as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets from the nation’s banks, one month after being widely criticized for presenting a plan that lacked any specifics on how it would work. It’s widely accepted that the toxic assets are more like $2 billion. The truth is the toxicity is in the multiples of trillions.

Treasury has less than $300 billion left in the financial rescue plan that Congress reluctantly approved last year.

To avoid asking Congress for more money, Geithner has been trying to stretch government money by working with private investors, the Federal Reserve and government-controlled entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But that has introduced other tough policy issues, many of which remain unresolved.

“Their huge problem is that the American public is not willing to accept large losses for large financial institutions,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed official and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research and lobbying organization. “Everything they are doing is about having the smallest possible footprint on the federal budget. They don’t want to engage the Congress and they don’t want to engage the American people in that discussion.”

Compounding the mess at the Treasury Dept., almost all the top posts beneath Turbo-Tim are still vacant. The White House has become so worried about potential tax problems and other issues in the backgrounds of candidates that it has nominated only a handful of people.

Obama is letting Tim spin for now, because Barry’s cramming for April’s Group of 20 meeting in London. Officials say they will still develop basic principles in time for the meeting, but the plan will not include much detail. Aye, and there’s where the devils always play. There is great pressure on the U.S. to fall in line, lockstep with the group’s insistence on submitting U.S. control over it’s own financial markets and regulations to a global regulatory system. One-world governance of our nation’s financial institutions. Capital idea, no? No.

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