Rep. Darrell Issa Has Some Advice For the President
The way Congressman Darrell Issa sees it, the country seems to have bottomed out. A Californian by way of Ohio, he’s an optimistic (if not delusional) type.
As the Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Issa, a Republican, led the charge against the Obama administration for offering Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania a job to convince him not to run against longtime Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter for the Democratic nomination in that state. Sestak ran anyway, and won.
“I’d like to get this behind us,” said Issa. “This was a one-day story, Don. All they had to do was say, ‘Yeah, we had President Clinton try to get him out of the race, and that would have ended it.”
Had Obama’s team fessed up, it would have never been revealed that Clinton was used as a surrogate to get around breaking the law that forbids a person with an appointed governmental position from doing political work on government time.
Either way, this sort of behavior is not the kind of “change” people signed up for when they voted for President Obama, though Imus pointed out nobody from either party will ever be capable of changing Washington.
“Only fools believed President Obama when he talked about all the stuff he said he was going to do when he got elected,” said Imus. “He said all that stuff to get elected!”
All Issa wants is the truth, whether it’s told to him or to, say, the FBI, to whom he has written a letter requesting further investigation. “If they say no laws were broken, I’m more than satisfied to live with that,” said Issa.
Obama is going to meet with Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, for the first time, but Issa believes he should be talking to everyone but that guy. “I’d call in other companies and say, ‘Send me your best drilling expert to educate me, to tell me what government could or should be doing that we’re not doing,’” said Issa. “The last guy in the world I would call to find out what government should do are the people who made the mistake.”
He even suggested Obama talk to Halliburton, whose faulty sealing of the leaky well is cited as one of the possible causes of the devastating explosion on April 20.
Unlike Imus, Issa thinks the environment of the Gulf Coast will heal itself in time, but that the oil industry can only be healed by reform. “I mean real reform,” he emphasized. “Not just breaking one organization into three little organizations.”
Like Obama, Issa thinks the Israeli blockade of Gaza is unsustainable for all parties, particularly the innocent people on both ends of the spectrum. “A lot of people forget, Gaza is a place in which Hamas killed fellow Palestinians even after they won an election,” he said. These guys are bad, he added, but not only toward Israel. “They’re bad to their fellow Palestinians.”
He recommended bringing the “comparatively moderate” Palestinian Authority into Gaza to take charge and bring some stability. “Otherwise, yeah, you’re going to keep having rockets, and you’re going to have the Israelis not giving things that are as simple as pasta and building materials to the lawful Palestinians in there.”
As for Iran, on whom the U.N. imposed further sanctions this week, Issa said Obama needs to be “more Reagan than Reagan,” and not try to make Iran “better,” because it’s never going to happen.
“Iran wants to have access to the rest of the world, and influence,” he said. “The price for access and influence is not just making news—it’s not supplying terrorist activities to the Middle East.”
Based on the overwhelmingly depressing nature of this conversation, we'd like to override Issa’s naive observation that things had “bottomed out.”
-Julie Kanfer
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