Maddow does such a perfect job of explaining the utter political incompetence of the Obama Administration in dealing with Jim DeMint's blocking of the Erroll Southers nomination to head the TSA, that she elevates Howard Feinman's game to perhaps his best perfomance of a lifetime. Rather than his usual cliche-repeating machine shtick, he does a reasonable impression of an historically informed wise man, following Rachel's scathing setup:
Sayeth Rachel:
MADDOW: Here's a quick lesson in how to fail in politics without really trying. This is Erroll Southers. He's a Homeland Security official in Los Angeles, a former FBI agent, a counterterrorism expert, and until today, he was President Obama's nominee to be the new head of the Transportation Security Administration.
Republican senators led by South Carolina's Jim DeMint blocked a vote to confirm Mr. Southers for weeks, alternately citing concerns that he might be in favor of unions at the TSA and calling him out over an FBI censure he received two decades ago for running a background check on his estranged wife's boyfriend.
Today, of course, we learned how the Obama administration ultimately responded to these Republican challenges. Not by taking a front, doubling down, pushing this nominee through, not by firing back, making the opposition to Mr. Southers more a political liability for those attacking him than an asset, not by using that handy recess appointment trick to put the nominee through, despite Jim DeMint and friends trying to stop it. But rather, the administration responded by-giving in, and at the same time, whining about how difficult the political opposition had made the climate in Washington.
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