“No Man’s life liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session”.

- attributed to NY State Judge Gideon Tucker



Thursday, June 12, 2008

Obama's Corrupt Inner Circle

The freshman Senator from Illinois hasn't even been the official nominee of his party for President for a month and already his campaign is beset by corruption and appallingly bad judgment.

Jim Johnson, a prominent uber-liberal and Obama's handpicked aide to screen potential VP candidates has been forced to resign from the junior Senator's campaign over undisputed evidence of the financier's conflicts of interest and corruption while an officer at Fannie Mae.

What is ironic, of course, is that, while Obama has pilloried Countrywide Mortgage for allegedly causing the housing finance situation of the past nine months, Johnson, while with Fannie Mae, accepted a sweetheart jumbo mortgage from the California mortgage giant. Moreover, the loan was personally arranged by Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo, raising red flags about improper behavior on Johnson's part while at the quasi-government mortgage finance institution.

Obama's now-typical excuse for such poor judgment in choosing as a close aide someone who was actually instrumental in the mortgage finance mess which the Democratic Presidential candidate so vehemently criticizes was, to paraphrase,

'How can I vet the vetters? It's not my fault. Everyone I would choose to be in my campaign has ties to someone.'

Great. The guy hasn't been an offical nominee for President for two weeks, and he's already excusing more of his bad personnel choices and inept vetting of his own staff.

Exhibiting yet another common response, Obama claims that the situation is not his fault, so it's not fair for anyone to castigate him about it.

If that were true, would Johnson have resigned? Not likely.

This latest example and evidence of Obama's not-yet-ready-for-prime-time campaign staff antics clearly show that he in now way represents 'post-partisanship' politics or any kind of clear, detailed constructive change from past partisanship.

Rather, Obama has demonstrated how well he learned Chicago-style politics-as-corruption.

Change we can believe in? Looks more like no change at all from Democratic party politics as usual. The wealthy Democrats tax other Americans, distribute the largesse to poorer Americans and call it progress, when it's just old-style pork barrel politics of the old-school variety.

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