Charlie Rangel's Scandal Revelation de jour

Every day there is a new revelation about Congressman Charlie Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rangel's committee is in charge of making tax laws, and Rangel's scandal de jour usually involves underestimating his net worth or income in some way.

Charlie's problems usually don't involve misinterpreting the tax law, his problem is that he tends to hide income. At least he understands the laws he helps to write.

Today's scandal is called Where is Charlie's Primary residence? Last year Charlie was found taking a tax break for people whose primary residence was in Washington DC, but if that was the case he couldn't be a congressman representing NYC. And besides, he was occupying four rent controlled controlled apartments in New York, the rule is you don't qualify for rent control unless the apartment is your primary residence. That is why he got in trouble for using one of the apartments as his office.

Charlie has one more primary residence. That town house worth one million dollars discovered yesterday, the one he forgot about on his financial disclosure form was listed on his mortgage agreement as his primary residence. But wait, that would mean he was ripping off the City and his landlord by claiming those rent controlled apartments as his primary residence:

How can Democrats continue to close their eyes to such sleaze? I believe that independents and students read these threads. Indeed I believe the professional politicians and pundits read these threads. Sometimes one can read a reply on this thread and then listen to the same idea an hour later on talk radio. On the theory that persuadable people sometimes read these threads, I occasionally like to write a reply " for the record" as it were so that a conservative position can be articulated on a given subject and someone, perhaps a college student, might come across it and be influenced for conservatism. In doing so, one risks the criticism of pedantry for discoursing on the obvious. Here is such a reply I wrote yesterday:

If crimes of politicians are excused because of politics, the rule of law is undermined. You cannot have the rule of law without respect for the rule of law. If a lawful society is less important than political advantage derived from backing a politician who is a known criminal, a fatal disintegration is likely underway. Without the rule of law and without respect for the rule of law, you cannot have an orderly society, you cannot have a representative democracy, you cannot have a peaceful commonweal. Instead you will have cynicism, increasing corruption, and ultimately either tyranny or revolution, or both.

Just as an officer must be seen to be braver or at minimum at least as brave as his troops, so also must a politician be seen to be at least as law-abiding as his sheriffs and prosecutors demand from his constituents. It is a symptom of a decaying society that it excuses, for example, a chief executive who permitted serial felonies including perjury to fix a court case for no higher motive than to spare his own purse and reputation. When he is excused because people seek to protect their 401(k) plans or simply because he is a Democrat, our democracy is undermined. He was not excused because it was "just about sex," he was treated differently than you and me because of his status and that status included being a Democrat. It was said, "it's just about sex" not as a reason, but as a justification.

A Senator who writes laws cannot expect citizens to obey those laws out of any consideration other than fear when the citizens know that the senator is a scoundrel and a criminal who has been excused the consequences of his criminal conduct only because he is a Kennedy.

No taxpayer can be psychologically expected to decline to take any illegal deduction which he thinks he can get away with when he is fully aware that the Obama administration is staffed with tax cheats and the man who writes the tax bills of the United States House of Representatives, Charles Rangel, is himself a tax cheat who will probably skate because he is an African-American and a Democrat. The tax code operates under the assumption that the overwhelming majority of people will have to file honest tax returns and pay the taxes they owe.

All of this is not to justify criminal behavior by relating it somehow to the criminal behavior of Democrats. I abhor arguments resorting to relativism and leave them to the Democrats who are proven masters of the art. I do not say that the taxpayer is morally justified in cheating on his taxes because Democrats do it, I simply say that it is psychologically predictable that many will do so.

The Democrats have much to say about the disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor and virtually nothing to say about the disparity in the consequences of disobeying the law between the elite and the governed. The former phenomenon is probably beneficial because it opens up opportunity, the latter is a vaporous poison which corrodes all society.

So far I've referred to these people as "Democrats", they've now taken to calling themselves "progressives," but in many ways they most resemble the nomenclatura of a corrupt Soviet society which might be said to have died of its own corruption.

So that reply repeated yesterday was an argument that corruption in politics offends us not just because it is morally reprehensible but because it costs us. Those who do not vote to clean up corruption are imposing, wittingly or unwittingly, a corruption tax on the rest of us. When the motivation for overlooking corruption is tribal and racial as we have seen so often on behalf of black politicians like Jefferson of Louisiana and Rangel of New York and the Florida federal judge who was impeached and then promptly elected to the House of Representatives (whose name escapes me for the moment), it compounds the treachery against the rest of us.

That phenomenon, whether it is racism in voting in a candidate because of his race or reelecting a candidate who is corrupt because of his race, presents a real and actual threat to us and begs the question:

How can rinos and unaffiliated voters continue to close their eyes to Democrats who close their eyes to such sleaze?

I do not have the answer to that question but I do have advice for those of us who understand that we are offended and it is laid out in this reply which I submitted before Barack Obama's election:

There are two facts about Barak Obama which stand out above all others: first, he is so inexperienced that he is unqualified to be the president of the United States of American. Second, he is regarded to be African-American.

The truth, which no one seems to be willing to tell, is that such an inexperienced individual would never be the nominee of America's largest political party if it were not for the fact that he is accepted to be black. He would not be nominated if he were not African-American.

One of the ways he got nominated, apart from the mainstream media like Chris Matthews anointing him to assuage their white guilt, was by pulling better than 90% of African-Americans in the primaries. Another truth that is rarely mentioned is that, quite simply, African-Americans voted their race. They voted for Obama because he is black. That is the essence of racism.

The problem with this development for white voters is that people like Chris Matthews ask us to unilaterally disarm in the face of this racism. We are told at every turn that criticism of Obama's inexperience is thinly disguised racism. The mainstream media who tell us that, as well as black voters who are motivated by racism, are not just playing some game, they are trying to attain political power over all voters including white voters.

That is, after all, what politics is all about: who gets to enforce the decisions at the point of a gun about who gets what and who pays for it. In extreme instances, the chief executive commits our sons, and now daughters, to die on some battlefield. The stakes are almost infinite. They involve our blood and treasure.

If the game of politics is to be rigged by racism it is folly for white people to play a different game. If blacks can vote for Obama because he is black, whites can vote against him because he is black. If blacks can vote their race, whites can vote their race too, and do so free of taint of racism.

The mainstream media, and Chris Matthews is the prominent example, perhaps unconsciously, have been struggling to divert white voters' attention away from these realities and away from voting their own self-interest, as well as the interests of the nation as a whole.

My advice: hold the Democrat party responsible as a criminal organization just as you would a criminal syndicate in a RICO prosecution. All Democrats should be anathema to every decent American citizen. They should be as marginalized as the Ku Klux Klan or the Cosa Nostra. They are not misguided politicians with a different worldview, they are evil operatives who simply must be deprived of power if we are to retain our liberties and bequeath the American dream to your children.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.