But the White House press secretary certainly should go f%$# himself after this outburst:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

……

As a bit of fact checking, Canadian healthcare is actually a good thing, it has lower prices and better outcomes than we in the US achieve, and I can’t find anyone who supports abolishing the Pentagon, not even Dennis Kucinich, whose supporters Gibbs excoriates later in the interview.

For a senior adviser to the president, this is stupid and regrettable. For the press secretary, whose sole job is to cast administration policy in the most positive way, it is inexcusable.

This is not just beneath the behavior of a sentient being serving as press secretary, it’s beneath Dana Perino at her most addle-headed.

That being said, Paul Krugman makes a very good point, that, “What’s good for Obama is not necessarily good for his aides.” He calls it the “Principal Agent Problem,” which is economist wonk-speak for saying that people who work for someone may frequently advance their own agenda at the expense of those of their boss.

A classic case is overpaid executives who are nominally, “working for the shareholders,” when they are actually working to maximize personal gain, even at the expense of the viability of the corporation.

Obama is not really harmed by criticism from his base, but this criticism might change just who Obama listens to, so this reaction is almost certainly a reflection of his staff’s insecurities more than it is a realistic concern for Barack Obama or his agenda.

I think that Krugman sees the point clearly, but that he does miss another one: This sort of reaction is a fairly common in the Obama White House, Google, “f%$#ing retarded,” for example, and it indicates a staff that is obsessed with their own positioning at the expense of the administration and Obama’s policy agenda (whatever the f%$# that is).

So, your press secretary probably deserves to be fired, and the counter productive venom expressed by your staff indicates that the staff are not being properly managed, which says something distressing about his chief of staff.

Here’s hoping that Obama won’t hang onto Rahm the way that Bush hung onto Rumsfeld, and yeah, dumping Vilsac and Salazar might be a good idea too.