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.

Congressional Pork In Green Wrapper

The Wall Street Journal's editorial in last Monday's edition, entitled "Cap and Spend," pretty thoroughly eviscerated Barbara Boxer's Senate carbon bill. It's notionally authored by Lieberman and Warner, but Boxer is said to be real driver behind it.


Perhaps the saddest aspect of the legislation is not even its grotesque misrepresentation of the bill as doing 'something' about carbon and global warming, never mind the bad science on that.

No, it's Congress creating an immense $3Trillion slush fund to use to reward some interest groups, and punish others. This is a mind-boggling sum which voters truly do not yet fully comprehend.

Since the carbon permits and capping don't have any solid basis in their origin, this, of course, invites large amounts of corruption and undue influence to favor various groups. And other taxes aren't being cut to offset this magical new tax on a heretofore simple energy/raw material business input.

One of the more hilarious Senate inclusions, which I saw lamely defended on CNBC last week, is $190B for 'green collar jobs.'

When asked if the Senate was now in the business of job creation, whichever Senator Foghorn was speaking began to sputter and insisted that these jobs were necessary to offset the ones they'd kill with this enormous tax.

Fortunately, George Bush will veto this green pork bill.

And, as much as I respect Joe Lieberman for some things, he lost a lot of that when, in reply to criticism for it being such a bad bill, he replied, to paraphrase,

'That's okay. It doesn't really take effect until 2012!'

Great. Bad legislation is okay if it's delayed sufficiently for everyone to forget what a major error it will be.

God deliver us from Congress- both parties!