I have a list:

1. It will be a helluva year.

2. See No. 1.

I'm away for a few days. See you when all the fun starts next week....

I was a guest on Newshour on Monday night to discuss the full foreign policy plate that awaits Barack Obama on January 20. (You can see the complete transcript here and download the video here.) Just before this segment was taped, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Sallai Meridor, was interviewed by Margaret Warner regarding the Gaza crisis. What struck me was not his words--he said the expected--but the pin on his lapel.

Look at this picture:

Ambassador Meridor is wearing a double flag pin that has the Israeli flag welded to the American flag. It may be that Israeli diplomats have long worn such a crafty fashion accessory. But this was the first time I noticed it. How cunning. Would the French ambassador be caught dead wearing two flags at once? Would the U.S. ambassador to any country boast a similar accoutrement? He or she could be accused of--yikes!--dual loyalties. But for the Israelis, it's quite natural: a not-very-subliminal message and a reminder why Israel does so well in the PR battle for America.

Not really. But I am away for a few days--in a much less sunny location. Please feel free to peruse my recent postings below.

The Iraq war is not over. Afghanistan is a mess. The economy is a mess. Nothing's been done about climate change. And all around the world people have cheered a guy who threw a shoe at the president of the United States. So what's Bush's legacy? On the foreign policy front, his people are trumpeting his so-called promotion of democracy abroad. And that's how Bushies are talking about the war in Iraq they are bequeathing to the next guy. Here's Condi Rice from Meet the Press this past Sunday:

RICE: This Iraq, at the center of the Middle East, a powerful Arab state that is a friend of the United States and democratic, is going to make the Middle East a fundamentally different place.

DAVID GREGORY: Do you believe that over time, then, the United States will emerge with what will be considered an unambiguous victory in Iraq?

RICE: I believe that it will be, as time goes forward, absolutely clear that Saddam Hussein's Iraq would never have allowed the Middle East to change, and that this Iraq has the potential to anchor a more democrat, a more prosperous, a more peaceful Middle East, and, by the one, one that--by the way, one that is friendly to the United States.

From Iraq, it's just a few skips and a jump to more democratic Middle East, right? Not so. Democracy activists in the region have been complaining about Bush's policies--especially the Iraq war--for years, noting that Bush has set back the cause of democracy in the Middle East.

'Tis the season, so....

I was on Rachel Maddow's show on Friday night, discussing the Rick Warren wrangle. What a surprise, we agreed--mostly. But she seemed to think that the Warren controversy could remain the story of the inauguration from now until January 20. I noted that it was clear to me that the Obama crew had calculated that the current dustup is not nearly as big as the holy war that would ensue should the president-elect rescind his invitation to the super-pastor. Unless the present outrage widens, I observed, the controversy could fade.

But before it does, I'd like to take one more (polite) shot at Warren. I do find him an intriguing fundamentalist, given his interest in climate change and poverty alleviation. And he has certainly tried to oppose gay marriage without appearing like a hate-monger. I suppose that's worth something. But while campaigning fervently against gay marriage, he recently said:

The issue to me is, I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

Warren's critics have pointed to this quote as evidence that he equates gays and lesbians with incest-lovers and pedophiles. (Indeed, when asked if he thought these other examples are "equivalent to having gays getting married," he said, "Oh, I do.") But I'd like to note Warren's adherence to this 5000-year definition of marriage.

Why doesn't Warren know his Bible better?

I'm no biblical scholar. But I can use Google. And I found BibleGateway.com, a searchable version of the Bible. I plugged "wives" into the search box and came up with the following results:

On Friday morning, I was on the CBS' The Early Show to talk about the Rick Warren controversy. Opposite me (via satellite hookup) was Robert Jeffress, a Baptist pastor from Dallas, who was billed as a friend of Warren.

Asked by Harry Smith to explain why gay and lesbian outfits and progressives were upset by Barack Obama's decision to hand Warren the invocation slot at the presidential inauguration, I noted that it was good that Obama has an inclusive approach toward political and policy debates, that he should make common cause with Warren on issues like poverty and climate change, and that it was wrong for him to grant Warren this high-profile platform because Warren's anti-gay remarks--he recently compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia--are insulting to a large number of Americans, particularly many who worked long and hard to bring Obama to the White House. It's one thing to sit at the table with Warren and discuss how best to alleviate poverty; it's another to enhance his status.

When Jeffress had his chance, he went on about how it was unfair to slam Warren as a hate-monger because of his fervent opposition to gay marriage.

Gay marriage? Who said anything about gay marriage? Not me. I had pointed out that Warren's big sin had been to equate gays and lesbians with loathsome pedophiles. Is that hate-mongering? Some people might see it that way. But I was not going to judge Warren on that front. His words speak for themselves--and for him.

A week and a half ago, I published an article in the Washington Post in which I reviewed the reasons for progressives to be concerned about Barack Obama's first rounds of appointments (Clinton, Gates, Summers, etc.) and noted that the president-elect seemed to be pursuing a change-by-cooption strategy. He was, I speculated, recruiting centrists and conventional members of the Establishment to advance a left-of-center policy agenda.

That might still be the case. But what to make of Obama's decision to hand over a slice of his inauguration to Rick Warren, the best-selling evangelical leader?

Warren is not your father's fundamentalist. He has talked much about addressing climate change, poverty, and AIDS. But he does share with his fellow fundamentalists a passionate aversion to homosexuality and gay rights (and, of course, opposes abortion). He has fiercely opposed gay marriage. According to People for the American Way, he has compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia. (Warren also has said that nonbelievers are indeed going straight to H-E-double hockey sticks.) It's no surprise that some progressives are mighty ticked off.

They have a right to be.

I understand the argument against Caroline Kennedy. It's basically this: what makes her so special other than her DNA? She's done good work, raising money for private-public partnerships that benefit public schools. She's written about the Constitution. And she's been classy--at least in the sense of never being an embarrassing celebrity. Is this enough to be a senator?

I am sympathetic to those who decry dynastic politics and who yearn for some semblance of a meritocracy in this nation. After all, this nation was founded in part in opposition to royalty. And is born-to-play much better than pay-to-play?

Still, I can't get that worked up about the possibility that New York Governor David Paterson will tap the daughter of JFK to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. The drift of today's stories seem to indicate that she might be closer to obtaining the position once held by her uncle Bobby. Why no outrage on my part? Maybe because with two wars and a collapsed economy, I'm experiencing outrage exhaustion this holiday season. But my colleague Nick Baumann made a decent case for her:

Dick Cheney is just going to keep on spinning his way out the door.

In an exit interview with ABC News, he was asked if he agreed with Karl Rove's recent statement that had there been better prewar intelligence the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq. (In the months before the war, George W. Bush and others in the White House had plenty of reason to know the WMD intelligence was iffy; still, they overplayed it for public consumption--but that's another story.) Cheney shot back:

I disagree with that. I think the--as I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren't any stockpiles. What we found in the after-action reports after the intelligence report was done and then various special groups went and looked at the intelligence and what its validity was, what they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feedstocks. They also found he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted.

Well--how to put this?--no. Not at all. That's not true.

I was on C-SPAN this past weekend, discussing all sorts of things. (You should be able to see the program here, but as of this writing the link was not yet operational.) And the host played the latest Republican Party ad, which, no shocker, tries to tie Barack Obama to Rod Blagojevich. Take a look:

Ominous music. Grainy footage. Headlines showing that Obama--OMG!--once supported Blagojevich. References in news reports noting that Obama aides might have had talked to Blagojevich about filling the Senate seat Obama vacated. And the kicker: "Questions Remain."

As the indictment filed against Blagojevich notes, the guv was not too pleased with the Obama camp. So it's unlikely that any talks that did occur were of the pay-to-play variety he fancied. But here's the bigger political picture: the GOP ought to be careful in deploying the usual political attacks against Obama in the near future.

At a moment when the country confronts several crises--an economic meltdown and two ongoing wars--a distinct majority of Americans are rooting for Obama. He won the popular vote with 53 percent of the electorate. And my hunch is that given the current economic troubles, there are a number of McCain voters--who are not ideologues or Obama-haters--who would like to see Obama succeed. After all, it's their economy, too. Would these McCain voters (who may be independents) rather watch Obama help preserve modern-day American capitalism or would they prefer to enjoy him being slammed by GOP mud balls?

Bloomberg has one of my favorite perennial Washington pay-to-play stories:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s political action committee contributed the maximum $10,000 to Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays's effort this year to keep his House seat.

Shays lost. Two weeks later, the PAC gave $5,000 to the winner, Democrat Jim Himes, whom it had shunned during the campaign.

New York-based Goldman Sachs, which declined comment, isn't alone. Other company PACs, including AT&T Inc. and Bank of America Corp., also began filling the campaign coffers of the freshmen who ousted their preferred candidates, federal records show.

"When an incumbent loses, donors naturally turn their attention to the new officeholder," said Rogan Kersh, associate dean of New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. "It's the American version of, 'The King is dead. Long live the King!'"

This happens after every election. Corporations that picked the losing candidate quickly turn around and dole out campaign cash to the victors. Why would they do this? Duh--to get access to these legislators so they can try to influence their votes on key matters. There's been plenty of chest-thumping in recent days about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and the corrupt pay-to-play system in Illinois. Yet a well-established version of pay-to-play exists in the nation's capital. It may be that Senate seats are not bought and sold in Washington; they're just rented. Which brings me to.....

I'm on the run today, but I did spot this bit of we're-shocked-shocked news. From the Center on Public Integrity comes a report entitled Broken Government that lists 125--count-'em!--"systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government" that have marked (and marred) the eight-year tenure of (now-disappearing) President George W. Bush. From the press release:

Among the examples:

* a Food and Drug Administration unable to guarantee the safety of food or drugs
* a National Aeronautics and Space Administration inspector general who blocked multiple investigations
* a budget deficit that ballooned to $455 billion for fiscal year 2008, and could reach $1 trillion in fiscal year 2009
* an Environmental Protection Agency that ignored and underutilized its own office and task force on children's health
* a Securities and Exchange Commission that sat largely on the sidelines, allowing little-understood new financial instruments to undermine the pillars of the economy
* a Federal Labor Relations Board with neither a general counsel nor the quorum needed to handle hundreds of complaints regarding unfair labor practices
* a terrorist detention system based at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whose legality has repeatedly been challenged by the courts

Many of the failures are rooted in recurring themes: agency appointees selected primarily for ideology and loyalty, rather than competence; agency heads who overruled staff experts and suppressed reports that did not coincide with administration philosophy; agency-industry collusion; a bedrock belief in the wisdom of deregulation; extensive private outsourcing of public functions; a general failure to exercise government's oversight responsibilities; and severely slashed budgets at understaffed agencies that often left them unable to execute basic administrative functions.

I know, I know. Most of this will not come as a surprise to anyone who has not been in a coma for the past eight years. The Government Accountability Office, as we reported recently at Mother Jones, has put together its own list. Chronicling the damage of the W years is an important job. And, alas, it won't be over any time soon.

This was first published at www.motherjones.com....

Patrick Fitzgerald is back.

With his dramatic arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on an assortment of corruption charges--including the allegation that Blagojevich wanted to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama--Fitzgerald, the hard-charging U.S. attorney in Chicago, has returned to the national stage as a scourge of dishonest government. His last star turn was as the special counsel who successfully prosecuted Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, for having lied to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation of the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

Throughout that investigation, the non-nonsense Fitzgerald repeatedly insisted that the case was about a simple matter: whether Libby had lied. But he did note it had wider implications. When Fitzgerald presented his closing argument, he declared, "There is a cloud on the vice president." He added: "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice." Two weeks later, after winning a guilty verdict on four of five counts, Fitzgerald noted, "Mr. Libby had failed to remove that cloud....Sometimes when people tell the truth, clouds disappear. Sometimes they do not." And when Bush commuted Libby's sentence, ensuring that Libby would serve no prison time, Fitzgerald huffed, "It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals."

His not-too-subtle point was that when it came to integrity, the Bush White House--or at least Cheney's wing--was, well, cloudy. (The trial had revealed much about Cheney's hard-edged political operation.)

The Libby case, for some, was a hard-to-follow affair, and conservatives and Republican allies of Libby and the Bush administration had rampaged against Fitzgerald and tried mightily to muddy up the episode. Thus, Fitzgerald's implied indictment of the Bush crowd partially got lost in the middle of a partisan mud fight. With the Blagojevich case, Fitzgerald is once again championing honest government, but this time he appears to have a case less likely to get caught up in the distracting swirl of ideological attacks. After all, Blagojevich has few friends who will go on cable TV to blast Fitzgerald for being a run-amok prosecutor. There may even be Republicans who praise his pursuit of Blagojevich, a Democrat.

As I noted in the previous posting, the "Outlook" section of Sunday's Washington Post featured a piece in which I evaluated Barack Obama's staffing decisions to date. I noted how several key picks had been either disappointing, upsetting or puzzling to some progressives. But I added that it was my hunch that Obama had adopted a change-by-cooption strategy, in which he will try to use centrist-oriented members of the Establishment to implement a left-of-center policy agenda.

And--boy!--how the responses have poured in. From the left, the right, and the in-between. On the left, the replies have been generally divided between those who are somewhat concerned by Obama's opening moves and those who say that they still believe he's a progressive leader and are hoping for the best but waiting to see what he can pull off with the team he is assembling. Those who claim to be moderates (or recovering Republicans) who supported Obama note that they did not vote for a president who would govern from the left, and they inform me that they are tickled pink that the candidate who promised to rise about partisan politics has loaded his White House and Cabinet with centrists. If he moves too much to the left, they warn, he will lose them.

Then there's the conservatives. They declare either that Obama is an empty suit and that progressives should not be surprised he is (as they put it) screwing them. Liberals should have realized, they argue, that there is nothing solid at this man's center and that he's a crass opportunist. You've been duped, they exclaim (somewhat joyfully). As one put it indelicately, "I don't blame you and the rest of the leftie idiots for having your nose out of joint. Obama used you and is now happily screwing you without even taking the time to kiss you first." Other rightwingers proclaim that Obama is a socialist, and none of his appointments can hide that. Once he starts this country on the road to socialism, they say, the citizenry will rise up against him--and he and the liberals will be vanquished in the next election.

That's some range of opinions. Reading through these emails, it occurred to me that Obama will be a Rorschach president. Citizens, voters, and, yes, pundits will see in him (or not see in him) what they want. I suppose this happens with most presidents. But given that Obama has been on the national stage a relatively short time, that he's a young black (or biracial) guy, and that he does indeed represent change more than your average president, it may be that he will be more Rorschach-y than most chief executives.

During the Bush years, there was never much debate over what Bush stood for or the meaning of Bush. Sure, there were lots of fights over his policies and whether he was up to the job. With Obama, I wonder if his supporters and foes will spend the next few years arguing over what's at his core. If so, that certainly will keep politics interesting and pundits employed.

I'm scheduled to do Hardball on Monday. And if you want to follow me on Twitter.com, you can. Go to Twitter.com/DavidCornDC.

In the past few weeks, I've been repeatedly asked by friends and acquaintances, "Well, what do you think of Obama's first appointments?" These various inquisitions gave me a chance to organize conflicting thoughts--which was fortunate, for The Washington Post's "Outlook" section asked me to contribute a piece on this question. The article will appear on the front page of the section on Sunday. But it's already been posted--old media meets new media--and here are some excerpts:

The more things change, the more they stay . . . well, you know. And looking at President-elect Barack Obama's top appointments, it's easy to wonder whether convention has triumphed over change -- and centrists over progressives.

A quick run-down: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who supported the Iraq war until she initiated her presidential bid, has been handed the Cabinet's big plum: secretary of state. And Bush's second defense secretary, Robert Gates, will become Obama's first defense secretary. The Obama foreign policy adviser regarded as the most liberal in his inner circle, Susan E. Rice, has been picked for the U.N. ambassador slot. Obama is elevating this job to Cabinet rank, but he's still sending Rice to New York -- and in politics and policy, proximity to power matters. For national security adviser, Obama has picked James L. Jones. The retired four-star general was not hawkish on the Iraq war and seems to be a non-ideologue who possesses the right experience for the job. But he probably would have ended up in a McCain administration, and his selection has not heartened progressives.

Obama's economic team isn't particularly liberal, either. Lawrence H. Summers, who as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary opposed regulating the new-fangled financial instruments that greased the way to the subprime meltdown, will chair Obama's National Economic Council. To head Treasury, Obama has tapped Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who helped oversee the financial system as it collapsed. Each is close to Robert Rubin, another former Clinton Treasury secretary, a director of bailed-out Citigroup and a poster boy for both the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and discredited Big Finance. Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board will be guided by Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman whose controversial tight-money policies ended the stagflation crisis of the 1970s but led to a nasty recession. (A genuinely progressive economist, Jared Bernstein, will receive a less prominent White House job: chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.)

It's no surprise that many progressives are -- depending on whom you ask -- disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied. Sure, Obama's appointments do represent change -- that is, change from the widely unpopular Bush-Cheney status quo. But do these appointments amount to the kind of change that progressives, who were an essential part of Obama's political base during the campaign, can really believe in?

Perhaps Obama is trying to pull off something subtle -- a sort of stealth liberalism draped in bipartisan centrism. But it's understandable that progressives are worried....

So with these hawkish, Rubin-esque, middle-of-the-road picks, has Obama abandoned the folks who brought him to the dance?

My hunch is that Obama has made a calculation. In constructing his administration, he has decided not to create a (liberal) Washington counter-establishment. Instead, he's fashioning a bipartisan, centrist-loaded version of the Washington establishment to carry out his policies, which do tilt to the left. (And good news for the establishmentarians: Having screwed up on Iraq or the economy is no disqualification.) When asked at a Nov. 26 news conference whether his appointments of old Washington hands indicated that his administration was not going to be a festival of change, Obama replied, "What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the -- the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me." His job, he added, was to "make sure . . . that my team is implementing" his policies. In other words, la change, c'est moi.....

For the moment, the watchword for progressives ought to be a version of an old Reagan trope: hope, but verify....

You can read the conclusion and the entire piece here.

Dealing with a crashed computer today. See you soon....

The other day, The Washington Post reported that President-elect Barack Obama was considering tapping Richard Holbrooke, one of the many runners-up in the secretary of state sweepstakes, to be a special envoy for South Asia, focusing on thorny matters involving India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Whether Holbrooke is the ideal candidate for the post or not, this is a good idea. For years now, the United States has not had any high-level official with immediate White House access in charge of the Afghanistan mess. And though the portfolio for this post would extend beyond the war, tapping Holbrooke or some other diplomatic bigfoot as such an envoy would bring much-needed policy leadership to the Afghanistan war.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece noting that the largely forgotten war had been forgotten by the Bush White House:

George Bush has no senior-level official responsible for policies and actions in Afghanistan. "The situation is worsening," notes former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. "We have to have someone in government responsible for the whole picture--military, economic assistance and political. There's a nexus between each. But there's not one person in the government designated to be in charge of that nexus. It could be the ambassador. It could be someone else--if they have resources and clout and accountability. But this Administration has not been keen on accountability."

Since then, there have been no signs of much change on this front. Can you name any top Bush administration official overseeing Afghanistan issues? Let's hope Holbrooke--or some other runner-up--wins this consolation prize.

Is it spin or self-delusion?

In an interview with George W. Bush, ABC News' Charlie Gibson asked if he had a "do-over," what would it be. Bush replied:

The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Whoa, there. Time for a reality check: much of the intelligence was indeed iffy, yet Bush acted as if it had been as solid as Dick Cheney's arrogance. Bush, Cheney and others claimed that Saddam Hussein had obtained aluminum tubes that could only be used for enriching uranium for bombs--when the intelligence community was split on this point (with the true nuclear experts maintaining the tubes could not be used for such a purpose). At one point prior to the war, Bush said that it wasn't known whether Saddam yet had obtained a nuclear weapons--suggesting that the Iraqi dictator might have already gone nuclear. But every intelligence report noted Iraq was years away from producing a nuclear bomb. In the run-up to the war, Bush hyped less-than-definitive intelligence--insisting it was indeed definitive--and exaggerated the case for war. (Don't believe me? Go read Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)

Gibson followed up:

On Monday night, I attended a screening of Frost/Nixon, the new film directed by Ron Howard and written by British dramatist Peter Morgan. It's an excellent and highly entertaining tale recounting and recreating the 1977 interview of the resigned and disgraced president conducted by British talk show host (and man about town) David Frost. Though Morgan said after the screening that he had not intended the film to be a statement on the current occupant of the White House, the film does raises questions about Bush. In a key moment during the interview, Nixon (played astutely by Frank Langella) responds to a question from Frost (placed wickedly by Michael Sheen) about a White House plan for the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Nixon says (as he did during the actual interview), "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." In the film, Nixon goes on to add, "But I realize no one else shares that view." (That quote does not appear in the transcript I found of that portion of the interview.)

How can this not conjure up recent history, when the Bush administration essentially argued the same point to justify its use of Gitmo, torture, unlimited detentions, extraordinary renditions and the like? Bush, however, has not noted that only he buys this argument. In fact, the White House counsel's office and Bush's Justice Department went to great lengths to come up with legal opinions supporting this view of the all-powerful chief executive. In the real Frost interview, Frost pushed Nixon on this point, asking, "Is there anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that suggests the president is that far of a sovereign, that far above the law." Nixon answered: "No, there isn't. There's nothing specific that the Constitution contemplates in that respect."

At the screening, Morgan noted that he "never" wanted the film "to become a springboard for talking about George Bush." Though he has written a wonderfully engaging movie--that both nails Nixon and depicts him somewhat sympathetically--Morgan, alas, did fail in that regard. I wonder if Bush will watch it. The film opens this weekend, and Bush does seem to have time on his hands these days.

All the talk is Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. As President-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team on Monday morning, the headliner was indeed the junior senator from New York State. While this move remains a surprise and perhaps even a gamble--I've had my say on this--it could be that the more important pick of the day is retired General James Jones to be Barack Obama's national security adviser.

One of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's many accomplishments was to wreck the national security apparatus of the United States government--with key assists from Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. For years, Foggy Bottom and the CIA were at war with the Pentagon and the White House, while the national security adviser (that would be Rice) became not a policy broker (as the job requires) but an enabler. She allowed ideologues to run wild and to trump expertise. She made sure that dissenting opinions were not placed front and center before the president. Foreign policy became the territory of a small band of arrogant know-it-alls who, it turned out, did not know nearly enough.

On Bush and Cheney's watch, the system broke down--by design. It's imperative that the foreign policy machinery of the US government be revived and restored. There needs to be a working balance between the intelligence community, the military, and the diplomats. There needs to be a free flow of ideas. The views of true experts inside and outside the government ought to be factored into major decision-making. And it is the job of the national security adviser to ensure this happens.

That mission will fall to Jones. At a press conference on Monday morning, Obama said that Jones