Rep. Kingston. I keep forgetting he's an actual congressman and not just a parody Twitter account.

Rep. Kingston. I keep forgetting he's an actual congressman and not just a parody Twitter account.

Remember all that commotion early in the Obama administration about czars? All these unelected officials running amok, imperilin' our democracy and whatnot, plus the name czar sounded communist and even if czar was in fact a made-up shorthand that was never actually part of their official titles it still sounded ominous when you said czar, so you can be pretty sure they were all up to something?

Yeah, never mind all that. 'Tis a new day.



Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said Saturday that while he "hate[s] to invoke the term 'czar,'" President Obama needs one to combat the spread of the deadly Ebola virus. [...] The congressman said the United States needs a "George Mitchell type character" to lead "one central office that's a clearinghouse" to unify the efforts of government entities like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As Steve Benen points out , Rep. Jack Kingston was the House Republican who introduced legislation banning czars, so dangerous they were to democracy as we know it, and got over a hundred fellow House Republicans to co-sponsor the thing. Senate Republicans were up in arms over it as well, in addition to a great many Republican pundits. But that was then, and this is now, and now appointing unelected czars to oversee things is exactly what Obama should be doing so shut up.

Also demanding a new czar: Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who released a conspicuously bitter statement to that effect. So far there's no suggestion that the "crisis," which Burr asserts to be a matter of "national security," would muster Burr's party to stop blocking Obama's nominated Surgeon General in the Senate, but in the absence of that they'll be fine with Obama appointing an unnominated, unblockable czar instead.