Wacky Obama Adviser Slated for Attorney General?

Earlier, I wrote about Obama’s possible appointment of Charles Ogletree, who believes that America is a racist country that is to blame for 9/11, to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division.

Some commentators, like the award-winning journalist A. Barton Hinkle, wondered whether I wasn’t overstating Ogletree’s links to Obama (by calling him Obama’s “top adviser” on race), given his out-of-the-mainstream views.

Actually, it seems that I understated Ogletree’s links to Obama and possible role in the Obama Administration. As legal commentator Walter Olson notes, Ogletree is now being described as a possible Attorney General — not just Assistant Attorney General — by CBS News and Newsweek.

Moreover, Newsweek describes Ogletree as Obama’s “top criminal-justice adviser,” not just his adviser on race issues. (Neither CBS nor Newsweek discusses Ogletree’s well-documented controversial positions, such as claiming that Obama’s election was only possible because he is part white, and his long-time advocacy of race-based reparations. Among liberal journalists, unlike the general public, these positions may not seem out-of-the-ordinary. But Ogletree’s left-wing positions have attracted a great deal of criticism on talk radio, from broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, which might help to explain why liberal lawmakers want to shut down talk radio using the misleadingly-named “Fairness Doctrine“).

Walter Olson also discusses the possible appointment of RFK, Jr., to be EPA Administrator or Interior Secretary, despite having espoused crackpot theories about autism being caused by vaccines, and calling his critics traitors, and being described even by liberal journalists as “kind of a nut.”

Other possible appointments in the Obama administration include Deval Patrick, an advocate of censorship and racial quotas, and Jamie Gorelick, who sat on the board of scandal-plagued mortgage giant Fannie Mae, at a time when it was engaged in massive accounting-fraud to inflate its managers’ bonuses, and who created a bureaucratic “wall” against sharing intelligence data between foreign and domestic agencies that prevented the FBI from learning more about the 9/11 hijackers before they carried out their terrorist attacks.