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The most comfortable part of being a conservative living in a liberal world is that you never have to reach farther than the length of your thimble to cite the questionable competence of progressives.
As the Personnel Director of America for at least the next four years, Barack Obama is a colossal failure, and he has not even been crowned yet. Surely this is a record.
Since his careless transition team began selecting successors to the Bush administration incumbents, Mr. Obama, by actual count, has committed 51 “bumps in the road” — the new media euphemism for “failures we are reluctant to acknowledge.”
He has been so busy plucking one of each kind of American that journalists have been too overcome by the fumes of his devotion to diversity to admit that he has picked some truly lousy boys and girls.
If Mr. Obama were working in the private sector as a personnel director, even though he is a black Democrat, he would have been canned sometime in the last eight weeks for choosing character-failures such as Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, Bill Richardson and Tim Geithner.
• Mr. Holder, the next Attorney General, has lived long enough to outrun the harsh criticism he attracted eight years ago after being the legal genius behind the pardoning of a gang of Puerto Rican terrorists and fugitive financier Marc Rich.
• Mr. Emanuel, chief of staff for The One, was instantly exonerated over his still unexplained involvement with the indicted governor of Illinois. Media curiosity died a couple days along when the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times carried headlines that said, “Obama Probe Clears Himself and Staff.” That was the innocence-clincher for me, as I presume it was for you, dear reader.
• There is a roomful of ironies involving the dubious Mr. Richardson, the governor of New Mexico. His latest ethical flirtation is his alleged role in a pay-to-play scheme with an equally shady Beverly Hills company. He is one of the most accused politicians in America. Since last August, the Albuquerque newspaper has been reporting an FBI investigation of him. Mr. Obama knew it, and nominated him for Commerce Secretary anyway. After Mr. Richardson was forced to pull out days after his nomination, one historian said, “Richardson's penchant for lying and unsavory associations have finally caught up to him.”
• Finally, there is Mr. Geithner, the Would-Be But May Not Be Treasury Secretary. The ethically shaky young genius has been tapped to oversee the IRS, but now we learn that he has a history of blowing off his own taxes. At his Senate committee nomination hearing yesterday, the news was not so much that he had not paid his taxes for four years, or that he had them forgiven for two of those years. The interesting part was that Mr. Geithner did not pay those back taxes until a few weeks ago, after Mr. Obama nominated him. That, pal, is arrogance. Damning evidence about Mr. Geithner’s behavior that is emerging today may yet scuttle his nomination.
Three of these four gentlemen — except for the chubby and crude Mr. Richardson — have been pinned with a single identifying label since Mr. Obama invited them into his family. As if it were as incontrovertible as their number of eyes, each gentleman repeatedly has been described as “smart” in an attempt to insulate them from criticism.
Being smart, not clouded character, has been each one’s admission ticket to the inner sanctum. The line employed interchangeably by Mr. Obama and liberal journalists is that being “smart” is sufficiently qualifying to drown out character imperfections.
These missteps in judgment help to explain Mr. Obama’s trail of radical associates throughout his life, from the jailed Rezko to the America- and white-hating Wright to the terrorist Ayers.
Was Criticism Deemed Illegal or Immoral?
Talk about a lucky guy.
Fifty-one public errors Mr. Obama has committed.
However, neither singly nor cumulatively have these gaping misjudgments of key personnel merited a drop of criticism from America’s most popular newspapers and most watched television networks.
The most disappointing dimension of this abrogation of responsibility by the media is that Mr. Obama’s startling miscalculations were rooted in known evidence by him and his vaunted transition team.
To be fair, any boss can be caught off guard by a piece of negative latent evidence that belatedly emerges in a new hire.
It is so troubling that Mr. Obama knew the failings if these four and ordered his lackeys to proceed anyway.
Arrogance, Not Cream, Rises to Top
There is a dark quality in Mr. Obama’s still-mysterious, well-shielded character that has been sunnily ignored since his Presidential campaign surfaced two years ago:
It is his sky-wide arrogance — as in “Don’t tell me what to do, pal.”
This is an unsurprising streak in a man who has been so sparsely employed for the last 26 years.
Mr. Obama frequently performs as if Arrogance, rather than Hussein, is his middle name. The steaming scent of cavalierness by Mr. Obama and sloppiness by his vetters have been on full display for 70 days. Yet his “bumps in the road” have not drawn a tickle of criticism.
If he were a Republican committing these characteriological violations while avoiding criticism, it would be written, frequently, that the gentleman is ducking a bullet.
This formulation, however, does not apply to Mr. Obama. Being Democratic and black — which amounts to a bullet-proof vest — not a bullet has been fired.
Mr. Obama’s increasingly stench-ridden misjudgments in the runup to his coronation suggest that, whether officially written down by the media or not, his scandals should easily outdistance those generated by President Clinton.
Given that arrogance comes so naturally to both, I predict that Mr. Obama will react to scandal the same way Mr. Clinton did and does, by proudly wearing them as badges of achievement.
