Dude, Where's My Change?

A couple of weeks ago we noticed the useful idiots on the left were already having a temper tantrum because Barack Obama wasn't appointing a cadre of freakazoids to his cabinet and was instead looking for more palatable Clinton retreads and assorted centrist types.

Well, they're still whining. This reminds me of little kids who during Christmas season ask every day why Santa didn't come yet. You have to explain to them when Santa is coming but also teach them what Christmas is all about. Santa Obama hasn't even arrived in office yet and the little kiddies are already clamoring for their presents, such as socialism, Hague trials for Bush and Cheney and gulags for radio talk show hosts they dislike.

They don't seem to understand a Cabinet and administration made up of Kos Kidz won't sell with normal Americans.

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.)

Corn goes on to cite the typical laments of nutroots bloggers, and warns if they don't get their way, there'll be trouble.

That doesn't mean Obama deserves a pass for (so far) bypassing progressives. When he announced his foreign policy advisers last week, he declared that he was a "strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions" and wanted "a vigorous debate inside the White House." But he has largely left liberals out of the debate. If strong progressive voices are not included in Obama's wild and woolly free-for-alls at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., they will have little choice but to find outlets on the outside (remember the Internet?) -- and become their own agents of change.

Translate that as they'll take their party off the cliff no matter what Obama does.

It's pretty clear the far left isn't open to diversity after all. If you don't march in lockstep with all their grandiose progressive goals they have no use for you.