The chutzpah of 'civility'

Peter J. Parisi of the Washington Times:

The day before Barack Obama's inauguration as president, "Purple Nation" columnist Lanny Davis pleaded on this page for a return to civility in our nation's politics.
Mr. Davis, a proudly self-professed liberal Democrat, announced his co-founding of what he is calling the Civility Project in a bid "to change the polarizing, attack-oriented political culture that has become all too common in recent years and, instead, to bring civility back as the staple of American politics and life."
Sorry, Lanny, as worthy as your aims may be, that horse fled the barn long ago. And it was your side that battered down the barn door.
Beginning shortly after President Bush assumed office in January 2001 and running through his departure from the White House eight years later, Democrats directed nonstop invective at Mr. Bush, and his call for a "new tone" in Washington went unheeded on the left. From "selected, not elected" to then-Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri calling Mr. Bush "a miserable failure" in September 2003 to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid calling him a "loser" during a civics discussion with a group of teenagers at a high school in May 2005 to Howard Dean's many rants to the MoveOn crowd likening him to Adolf Hitler, the political incivility of "recent years" Mr. Davis decries has originated almost entirely on his side of the political aisle.
For the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee now to feign outrage (for fundraising purposes) at radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh's saying "I hope he fails," referring to President Obama's socialist economic agenda, takes some serious chutzpah - even for the DCCC.

Chutzpah? Oh, well, you wouldn't want to accuse Democrats of having . . . what's that word, Michelle?

UPDATE: The PW-lanche!

Loyalty to losers

Be a political operative or be a journalist, but when you try to be both, don't think we don't notice:

NYT: Ex-Journalists New Jobs Fuel Debate on Favoritism

To which Jules Crittenden replies: "There's a debate?" (Via Instapundit.) This is a subject dear to the hearts of conservatives and, indeed, is quite nearly the raison d'etre of the conservative blogosphere. As Rush Limbaugh says, the problem with talking about liberal bias in the media is that he could do 15 hours a week and not even begin to scratch the surface.

I complained during the campaign season about certain conservative pundits who worked for various GOP primary contenders, and/or for the McCain campaign, knowing (a) what the benefit was to them for having gone through that revolving door, (b) that they would return to punditry pretending that no transaction had taken place, and (c) that upon their return, most of their readers would discount the possibility that they might make another such transaction.

If you've watched this kind of revolving-door thing as closely as I have for as long as I have, you start keeping handy a supply of salt, since everything that most political journalists and pundits write must be viewed in light of the possibility that they're angling for a campaign job, a speechwriter's gig, or some other career perk from the politicians they cover.

One of the reasons I'm always throwing elbows and raising hell is to make it clear that I have no such ambitions -- although if Bob Barr had won the White House, the Senate confirmation hearings for the ambassador-designate to Argentina would be the wildest thing ever broadcast on C-SPAN. ("Senator, I'm sorry, but I must once again assert my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.") There were only 68.9 million votes and the threat of a bipartisan filibuster standing between me and $145K a year.

Am I objective about Bob Barr? Absolutely. Am I going to tell you everything I know about Bob Barr? Absolutely not. Why? Because nobody will pay me enough to screw Bob over like that. See, that's the thing: The big money in the 30-pieces-of-silver racket is signing up with the winners, then screwing them over by selling to a book publisher the "insider exclusive" about a job the taxpayers already paid you to do once. Public service for private advantage. Nice work if you can get it.

I write for money, and loyalty to losers doesn't pay anything, while betraying a winner can be very lucrative indeed. Betraying a loser -- the vicious stuff that "McCain campaign officials" did to Sarah Palin -- is an act so lowdown and cowardly that the only thing you might get in return is a politcal analyst job at CBS News. The "smart" thing to do as a political journalist is to keep your cards close to your chest until you think you've spotted the winner, then ass-kiss your way into a staff gig. But I'm too stupid to play that game, so the only politicians who ever want to hang out with me are the guaranteed sure-fire losers.

That probably explains why I so underestimated Michael Steele's chances to win the RNC chairmanship, because he never seemed to mind hanging out with me. So if he is not going to say anything about that December 2006 meeting where I explained my brilliant plan for him to win the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary, then I am certainly willing to pretend that conversation never happened. And if somebody asks me if I'm just joking, well . . . what's it worth to them

Nobody trusts a guy who kids around like that (ROTFLMAO!) which is just the way I like it. Far be it from me to act all serious and responsible while I talk my way into a White House job, then sign a fat contract with a division of Simon & Schuster to backstab the guy who trusted me with that serious responsibility.

No, I'm very proud to be regarded as an irresponsible clown, a loose cannon on the deck who might start randomly firing off truth at any moment. Just a greedy capitalist who's only in it for the money, but because I'm honest about that -- and there is nothing more honest than pure capitalism -- I don't worry much about silly stuff like "conflicts of interest." I mean, there's no way in hell that anything I ever say is going to be quoted anonymously in the New York Times with an attribution to "a senior administration official," right?

It's kind of funny how two-faced backstabbers get paid big bucks to sell out their patrons, while an honest capitalist has to scrap for every dime. It's easier to be honest, if somewhat less lucrative, when you make it clear up front that you're completely untrustworthy. No "smart" person would play it that way, but when I come home at night, my wife doesn't ask, "So, honey, who did you sell out today?"

Better to be a valuable friend and a dangerous enemy than the other way around.

Indiscreet? Sometimes. But if I slip up and accidentally say the wrong thing to the wrong person, my friends can always say, "Aww, that guy's crazy," and nobody's going to argue otherwise, least of all me. (Who knows when the insanity defense might come in handy? If only G. Gordon Liddy had thought of that possibility . . .) So my friends are guaranteed "plausible deniability" up front. Suppose, hypothetically, I were to say that the Libertarian Party National Convention reminded me of a Cheech & Chong movie, nobody could possibly take that kind of remark seriously, could they?

"Senator, on the advice of counsel, I regret that I must once against assert my Fifth Amendment right . . .".

Damn. Buenos Aires is lovely this time of year.

'There is a marked tendency for heterosexual men to be interested in women'

Says Donald Douglas, quoting Little Miss Attila, in a discussion of "family values" in the blogosphere. (Just as there is a marked tendency of heterosexual women to be interested tanned, lean men in Speedos.)

I believe the original context for LMA's remark was the hotness of Sarah Palin. Some women (hello, Kathleen Parker) are not sufficiently secure with themselves and therefore are compelled to project their insecurities onto people of whom they are secretly jealous. Other people are repressed old fuddy-duddies (or worse, young fuddy-duddies) and are offended by reference to the fact of hotness.

I am an objective journalist and, as such, cannot suppress or ignore objective facts. So if somebody's hot, they're hot, and for me to pretend otherwise would be a violation of professional ethics. Discuss among yourselves.

A good whippersnapper

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, though admitting I might be "marginally despicable" -- fine phrase, that -- nonetheless realizes that the Internet has helped inflate the egos of smart young fellows, who've never been chastised for their hubris, as all smart young men need to be chastised from time to time.

The gold-stars-for-everyone culture has produced too many of these young men who won't stand chastisement, which makes them peevish and unteachable. Well, if they won't learn in one school, they'll learn in another. This recession will take some slack out of the sails of these fellows who've known nothing but prosperity and success the entirety of their young lives. Nothing like poverty and failure to build character.

Attention, Chairman Steele

Dear Sir:

I'm at the home of mutual friends -- you've enjoyed their hospitality -- where the dear lady and I were discussing the wretched cluelessness of Republican political operations, including this good ol' boy network of consultants/vendors who are overpaid to deliver crap. There is this thing where, if you're somebody's buddy from College Republicans 20 or 30 years ago, you therefore will get a contract to do . . . something. 

It's the old "Jobs for the boys" patronage principle, and the GOP can't afford to roll that way anymore.

The problem can be summed up, said our mutual friend, in two words: Charlie Black.

And then later, our friend made an unintentional pun when she said, "There needs to be some sort of blacklist" of people that don't get RNC business anymore. Ever. Period.

Well, a Freudian slip, perhaps, but I think you get the idea. As my country kin might say, "There's too many pigs for the tits." And as I can imagine that the whole world right now is trying to get your attention to tell you what to do or to seek favors, all I can do is throw this up on my blog and tell you that our friend has hit the nail squarely on the head. Some fat pigs who've been sucking on the GOP tits too long need to be retired, voluntarily or otherwise.

Chairman Steele, you are the new sheriff in town. To the Charlie Black class of Republican Party operatives, you should say, "There is this thing out there called 'the private sector,' where you get paid according to results. Good luck with it, because we're not going to pay you to lose any more elections. Nice doing business with you. Now get out of my office."

To Joe Carter

I will try to update later with a more thorough response to your comment, but some quick points:

• I know things about the decision-making at Culture11. I can think of one decision in particular where a reasonable person would have stood up and said, "That's it. I'm walking out the door." Personnel is policy.
• The author of Tempting Faith, by the act of authoring that book, proved himself unworthy of responsibility.
• I have an e-mail address, you know.

Nothing personal, Joe. I know you're good people. But I'm tired of seeing good people get screwed over through misplaced trust.

'You know where he stands'

Dave Weigel interviewed a Republican activist from Virginia at the RNC meeting:

According to Chase, what the Republicans needed was more clarity, more conservatism, and more exposing of how the Democrats wanted to run people’s
lives -- how they wanted to decide which baby birds got the worms. "I supported Mitt Romney, because John McCain was not a real conservative," Chase said. Chase has been given new hope by her party's unanimous vote in the House of Representatives against the stimulus package. Going into [Friday's] vote for Republican National Committee chairman, Chase supported Katon Dawson, the conservative head of the South Carolina Republican Party. "He's a fantastic messenger," Chase explained. "You know where he stands."

Like you knew where George Allen stood. The operative word here is "you," by which Jo-Ann Chase means to indicate the conservative base, who require constant assurance that their candidate is a True Believer who is with them 100% on every issue, or else they fear they're being sold out.

This kind of political paranoia, this obsessive fear that your Republican friends are not really your friends -- and perhaps not really Republican -- has a basis in fact. (Cf., presidents named "Bush.") But it is stoked to the point of psychopathology by certain prominent people (I won't name names) who don't seem to understand a fundamental principle of coalition politics: You can't govern if you don't win.

I share with Ms. Chase her disdain for John McCain, for whom I would never vote if you put a gun to my head. But at some point, you have to get over that particular species of recto-cranial inversion which tells you that Katon Dawson is what the RNC needs at this desperate juncture. Katon Dawson would have been fine when the party was at its zenith of power circa 2003. At this point, however, he simply will not do.

That isn't really Katon Dawson's fault, nor Jo-Ann Chase's fault, but it is the reality of the situation, and conservatives who want to live in a cloud-cuckooland where every swing voter understands what is meant by "true Republican principles" have got to get a grip on reality, or else the GOP will go the way of the Whigs.

The Republican Party's problems may not really be as bad as they look right now, in the immediate aftermath of S.S. Maverick's encounter with the Obama iceberg, but solving those problems will require some very shrewd messaging and very shrewd messengers, and if Jo-Ann Chase wants to do something to save her party from further disasters, she needs to get her prayer circles working for Michael Steele. He's gonna need all the help he can get.

'Contrary to true progressive politics'

Depends on what your definition of "true" is:

Apparently, snatching someone without a court order, not giving them a lawyer, and then placing them in a remote country were never too much of a problem after all.

(Instapundit via AOSHQ Headlines.) The problem, of course, is that the pursuit of power is the purpose of all politics. "Progressives" made an issue over what they saw as Bush's abuse of power and, in doing so, attacked the power qua power. But then, when they elected their guy to the same office, he looked at the power and said to himself: Power is good.

If Obama didn't want power, he wouldn't have run for president. And while self-styled "progressives" will find a way to rationalize the Messiah's cynical betrayal of his campaign rhetoric, I'm thinking about some of my arch-libertarian buddies who were all about the O as part of that idiotic "Obamatarian" thing. (Don't blame me, I voted for Bob Barr.)

I wonder what someone like Dave Weigel is thinking now. If Obama loses the Weigel types -- all those clever young people who were understandably repulsed by the dumbed-down ideological gooeyness of "compassionate conservatism" -- you can see them being the fulcrum on which the zeitgeist shifts. Two things would be necessary to such a shift:

• These clever young people would have to penetrate through the imagery of Obama the Magnificent to understand that they have been hustled, ripped off and sold out like a bunch of stupid chumps.
• Republicans would have to find a message (and a messenger) that appeals to the wised-up sensibilities of these disillusioned young smart-alecks, bruised by the realization that just because you're smart doesn't mean you can't be a chump.

Step One will take care of itself. There is only so much bullshit the Weigel types will swallow. Step Two is the tricky part. The natural instinct of the GOP (and you saw this with the "Maverick" candidacy) is to play for respectability, to appeal to the timid sensibilities of middle-aged Rotarians. The disillusioned 20-somethings will never go for that lame-ass act. They want someone with a little more of the hell-raiser attitude. But someone smart and hip -- i.e., someone like them, because they're so fucking smart and hip they can barely stand themselves.

Charlie Martin on 'technological hooey'

While I was consumed by flame wars and the RNC election over the weekend, Charlie Martin published a necessary debunking of a meme promoted by the Washington Post. Read it. Charlie's good people.

Jazz Shaw, political expert

Frequent commenter Smitty nominates the assistant editor of the (woefully misnamed) Moderate Voice for his prestigious Asshat of the Day Award:

[P]oll data like this could indicate that the Republican Party is getting ready to relive the classic cycle of ruling parties who get turned out of power in a landslide: With the party base itself shrunk down, the people who are still around are the most hard-line members, and are really the least fit people to fix the situation.

"The people who are still around" represent 46% of the electorate, voters who held their noses and voted for a RINO in an election where the decisive factors were (a) the unpopularity of Bush, and (b) the media's leg-thrilling raptures over St. Obama of Chicago, whose amorphously vague rhetoric (tax cuts for 95%!) went unexamined even as a function of simple mathematics, to say nothing of more complex fiscal and economic questions. (One more time: It. Won't. Work.)

If 46% is the rock-bottom insoluble core of the anti-"progressive" vote, the GOP's problems are not as dire as they seem, and the solution may be as simple as nominating a candidate who's not a grumpy, bald 73-year-old RINO. Gee, can anybody here think of such a candidate?

Attention, Doug Kmeic

Let a real pro-lifer tell you something:

Obama has promised to sign a measure called the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate virtually every federal, state and local measure that limits or restricts abortion.
That means no restrictions on public funding of abortion, no parental-involvement or informed-consent requirements, and a re-emergence of partial-birth abortion.
There’s no reason to doubt Obama's promise; his pro-abortion voting record and policy positions pave the way for him to sign such legislation into law.
But don’t count the pro-life movement down and out. It has withstood devastating Supreme Court rulings and pro-abortion presidents before. And it will again.

Doug Kmiec, traitor. "No serious pro-lifer that I know has followed him into the Obama camp, and for good reason." Here's a "serious pro-lifer," Charmaine Yoest:

Thomas Sowell on principles

A very timely message:

What principle separates the Republicans from the Democrats? If they are just Tweedledee and Tweedledum, then elections come down to personality and rhetoric. If that happens, you can bet the rent money on the Democrats winning. . . .
When have the Republicans won big? When they stood for something and told the people what that something was. . . .
Too many Republicans seem to think that being "inclusive" means selling out your principles to try to attract votes. It never seems to occur to them that you can attract a wider range of voters by explaining your principles in a way that more people understand.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.) Sowell is talking about his specialty, economics -- especially the idiotic mortgage price-fixing scheme proposed by Senate Republicans -- but he could be talking about any number of other issues where weak-kneed Republicans pander by endorsing liberal ideas. These organ-transplant candidates (lacking eyes, brains, spine, and testicles) do not understand that standing firmly on principle is ultimately good politics: Better politics than appearing weak, wobbly and wish-washy.

That's why last week's solid "no" vote against the stimulus bill was so beautiful. Rather than give Pelosi and Obama a fig leaf of "bipartisan" camouflage for their budget-busting nightmare of pork, the Republicans stood up on their hind legs and said to the Democrats, "Take it, it's yours."

It. Won't. Work. And because it won't work, the fewer Republican fingerprints on it, the better. When Obama's economic plan fails -- and it will -- the GOP needs to be in a position to tell voters, "We told you so. We voted against it. And here are the TV ads showing our members, speaking in January 2009, predicting exactly the economic disaster that has now unfolded."

Change I can believe in

Philip Klein of the American Spectator announces "The Daschle-Klein Plan":

Tom Daschle gets confirmed and his universal health-care plan is adopted, but I don't pay the taxes required to finance the program. I get caught, but simply write a letter apologizing for the oversight and am promptly rewarded with a high-profile government job.

Brilliant. That boy's going places. Like Leavenworth.

It would have been nice . . .

If someone had bothered to do some reporting about this before the election.

Arguing with LMA

Just when she was starting to worry that she is thinking too much like me, Little Miss Attila gives me an excuse to talk smack:

[I]t can be a challenge to get journalistic training or experience in America without having one's free-market or pro-defense instincts surgically removed via peer-group pressure. It is easy to say that the center-right political movements (both Conservative and libertarian) need more reporters, or academicians, or whatever -- but harder to endure the hostile work environments and overt/covert discrimination over a number of years that it would take to change the composition of news agencies or universities.

Meh. That's not really where the problem lies. The problem is that every Republican kid who can score 700+ SAT Verbal will go to law school. A smart Republican kid will not take his B.A. degree and go out to live for years on ramen noodles covering city council meetings and stuff like that for a 40,000-circulation daily.

Republican kids are careerist and status-oriented. They want to make lots of money. If they're good at math, they major in business, if they're stronger on the verbal side, they go to law school. If you wonder why there are relatively few whip-smart conservative reporters, go to a meeting of the Federalist Society. Those are the brains that, were they liberals, would be journalists. Or screenwriters. Or TV producers.

Socioeconomic factors being what they are, smart Republican kids tend to come from success-oriented families. Their parents don't spend $30K+ a year to send them to college so they can then earn $26K their first year as a staff writer at a mid-sized paper somewhere in southern Illinois covering tractor pulls and tornadoes. No, it's law school for them.

Think about conservative bloggers. How many of the top conservative bloggers have law degrees?

It isn't that there aren't smart Republican kids who can write. It's just that they paid enough attention to their high-school counselors to discover that journalism is the lowest-paying profession generally requiring a college diploma. The ordinary person turns on the TV or pick up the New York Times and thinks, "It's an elite profession." But it's not. The overpaid network TV types and the six-figure salaried people at the NY Times may be "elite," but they are in no way representative of the average American newspaper reporter, who earns less than a cop, an elementary school teacher, or a long-haul trucker.

Screw that, says the smart Republican kid, who instead takes the LSAT and goes to law school.

UPDATE: Just by way of historical background, I first met Little Miss Attila at CPAC 2006, when she was hanging out with Ace of Spades who -- at that point in time -- I had never even heard of before. I got her business card (I'm an inveterate collector of business cards) and didn't really think much more about it.

Then the uproar arose over Ann Coulter calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "raghead." LMA was among the bloggers who denounced Coulter's remarks as indicative of uncouth prejudice against Arabs. I defended Coulter as having expressed a very couth prejudice against Holocaust-denying fanatical Jew-hating midgets trying to obtain nuclear weapons.

As long-time readers know, my principle in flame wars is, "If you're going to cut a man, eviscerate him," and even my accustomed chivalry can be discarded under such circumstances. So I trashed LMA with every cheap ad-hominem at my disposal, which is quite a lot.

Then, in 2007, LMA and I were both at the YAF West Coast conference in beautiful Santa Barbara, and my remorse was extreme, as I recalled my former hillbilly jihad against her. She's really a wonderful person and, during one memorable performance by Jeff Goldstein, saved the day with her tranquilizer dart gun. ("No actual College Republicans were harmed during the filming of this documentary . . .:")

All of which is to say, she's good people.

Them vs. Us

Them:

No president has ever entered office with this much information. . . . This list is granular. And it is flexible and transferable to myriad media outlets — even those not yet invented. Begala believes it could potentially "revolutionize progressive politics."
The idea is a national operation, likely named Organizing for America, that will resemble Obama's grassroots operation in reach and love. It will be as finely tuned as the campaign behemoth and funded the same way — no money from third parties. If Obama has a policy initiative he wants to push, or a message he needs to disseminate, or a gaffe he wants to bat down, he will call David Plouffe and Plouffe will unleash the many-million-mouthed dog, just as he did all across America for these past two years.
If you believe in Obama and in the need for change and for a new, streamlined, hyperlinked Democratic party, then this is a watershed idea. It is a mechanism that could truly morph the power structure in Washington — waking up the unused, overslept public, as Plouffe successfully did on the campaign, and making an end run around lobbyists and interest groups.

Us:

?????

Compare, contrast, discuss.

The Katrina hustle

Remember how Hurricane Katrina devastated Atlanta, Georgia? You don't? Then what's this about the Atlantic public school system cashing in on federal relief funds?

Movement in A-minor

Mystery of Love
Words and music copyright (c) 1986
by Robert Stacy McCain

1. I don't understand it --
Your leaving me this way.
It's not the way I planned it.
I wanted you to stay.
And I can see no reason
Why you want to go.
If love is out of season,
Well, no one told me so.

CHORUS: Mystery of love (repeat etc.)

2. It came without a warning,
Came home and found you gone.
Early in the morning,
Just like in the song.
How could you desert me?
I treated you so well.
Do you really want to hurt me
And put me through this hell?

REPEAT CHORUS

BRIDGE: I don't, I don't, I don't understand it.
(Repeat, etc.)

INSTRUMENTAL BREAK

3. We looked so good together,
Or so I had been told.
I thought love was forever,
To have and to hold.
And I believed all the lies
That you told me.
Never realized
What a fool I'd be.
Now I understand the pain
And misery,
But won't you please explain
This mystery?

REPEAT CHORUS TWICE, AD LIBS, FADE
* * * * *

This lyric I reprint here, by way of indirect explanation for a comment I left over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, apologizing for my ill-tempered prosecution of an idiotic flame war.

Try to hear that song in your mind, would you? It is in A-minor, the chord pattern hypnotically repetitive, with a heavy bass synthesizer riff and the drums thundering down at about 118 bpm. There's also a harmonic overlay of call-and-response vocal in the chorus.

Try to imagine that song, with the Bar-Kays/Club Nouveau/Gap Band type of funk-rock arrangment and production I had in mind. And though it was written 23 years ago, I'm certain that if I could record it even today the way I heard it in my mind back then, it would at least make the mid-level of the R&B charts.

Well, none of the musicians I could find around suburban Atlanta circa 1986 was into anything like that, and I certainly couldn't afford to pay session cats and studio time to rehearse and record it. But when I tell you that journalism was not my original career choice, and that I ended up working in the newspaper business as a "fallback" option, I am not kidding.

'It is easy to mock . . .'

". . . white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance. And it takes only a cursory look at a worsening economic climate and grim national mood to realize that history is always threatening to repeat itself."
-- New York Times editorial

What the Times is huffing about is a press conference with Bay Buchanan, Jim Pinkerton, Peter Brimelow and Marcus Epstein which I covered last week. The report prepared by Epstein is available online, and any reader can assess the extent to which the slurs "white supremacist," "nativism" and "racism" are applicable. (I only skimmed the report, but it certainly didn't look like something Willis Carto or J.B. Stoner would publish.) The Times is to be congratulated for their effort, which I'm told got Bay Buchanan booked tonight on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Based on a superficial familiarity with the Epstein report, and with the discussion at the (lightly attended) press conference, I am left to wonder if there is any person, organization, publication or event aimed at discussing immigration as policy and politics from a border-enforcement perspective, that would not be denounced by the Times. in more or less the same manner as they've denounced Buchanan, et al.

Ah, but it seems like only yesterday that "dissent" was patriotic and we could not criticize Code Pink, CAIR, Ward Churchill, Cindy Sheehan or International ANSWER without being accused of totalitarian impulses. Some animals are more equal than others.

Perhaps we'll soon have a directive telling us exactly which forms of dissent, and on which issues, are still considered patriotic. Obama should order Secretary Dodd and the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows to look into this.

UPDATE: Behold, the face of white supremacy! (What would Lothrop Stoddard say?)

Obama names new Cabinet post

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Barack Obama yesterday announced that he would ask Congress to create a new federal department to help implement key elements of his ambitious agenda.

"Too long, the dreams of Americans have been denied, too long our nation's promises have gone unfulfilled," the president said during a White House news conference, in a nationally-televised speech that left several reporters wiping away tears at the unprecendented historic signficance of the moment. "No longer will we watch our children grow cynical with disappointment, nor see our senior citizens despairing of hope."

Flanked by congressional leaders -- including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was visibly moved with emotion -- the tall young president gestured dramatically as he declared: "America will wait no more. We must act now. For we the people, are the people, whose time, at last, has come."

After a standing ovation from the assembled journalists, President Obama went on to say that congressional leaders had agreed to "initiate an expedited agenda" in order to approve by next Tueday emergency legislation creating and funding the new department, its fiscal-year 2010 budget projected at "eleventy kazillion dollars," according to a senior administration official who spoke at a subsequent briefing.

Describing the new department's mission as "pursuing world peace . . . ensuring social justice and . . .restoring America's image abroad, an image tarnished by eight dark years of neglect," the president named veteran Connecticut statesman Sen. Christopher Dodd as secretary-designate with Cabinet rank.

As Secretary of the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows, Dodd will face "daunting challenges in this time of crisis," the president said, referring to the distinguished silver-haired senator as "one of our nation's most visionary leaders." . . .

CONTINUED ON PAGE A14

(LOGO DESIGN BY AARON S.)