The Fruit Of Our Nation's Sins

The Bulletin ^ | January 23, 2009 | James G. Wiles

[IbJensen]

This week brought home the terrible price our nation is paying for we Republicans’ tolerating greedheads in our own party’s leadership.

First, we have the rather obvious lack of, shall we say, virtue in President Barack Obama’s top three Cabinet picks.

There was Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, being confirmed as Secretary of State. When she was first lady, she was at the center of the Travelgate criminal investigation. After that and all the other criminal investigations of the Clinton White House subsumed under the label “Whitewater,” a special prosecutor reported that Mrs. Clinton had almost certainly lied under oath to a federal grand jury and hidden or failed to produce material evidence in response to grand jury subpoenas. But Hill, as Bill calls her, had done it so skillfully that the prosecutor concluded that it was unlikely that a jury would convict her of perjury or obstruction of justice.

It was Sir Harold Nicolson who said that “a diplomat is an honest gentleman, sent abroad to lie for his country.” So, it may be that the special prosecutor’s condemnation is really a certification of Hillary’s qualification to be our chief diplomat. If so, then Mrs. Clinton has matched the characterization of her husband by then Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerry, D, “[He]’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good.” Bill Safire of the New York Times famously described Mrs. Clinton as a “certified liar.”

One might think that this type of accolade disqualifies someone from holding an office of honor or profit under the United States. But, apparently, in the Age of Obama, it doesn’t. Call it “the Chicago Rule.”

And there’s more. There’s the spectacle, at the end of the Clinton administration, of Mrs. Clinton’s brother (then married to a daughter of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D- Calif., (How our dynasties do proliferate!)) and Mr. Clinton himself selling presidential pardons out the back door of the White House, even while the Marine helicopter was revving up out on the tarmac for the Clintons’ exit.

Who was pardoned? Well, Puerto Rican terrorists - who were not only not seeking a pardon but were not apologizing for blowing up innocent Americans in the Greater New York area — were pardoned to further Mrs. Clinton’s desire to become one of New York’s U.S. senators. Her election to the Senate, of course, made possible not only her near-election to the U. S. presidency last year but also her now becoming America’s third-highest Constitutional officer. At the same time, of course, Ol’ Bill pardoned tax fugitive Marc Rich, divorced husband of the bodacious and (financially) generous Mrs. Rich.

And a host of others. Plus the $ 110 million the Clintons managed to save since Billary left office.

Were the Clintons ashamed or have they apologized? Of course not.

Then there’s Attorney General -designate Eric Holder’s nomination to be our top law enforcement officer. He was involved up to his eyeballs in the corrupt Clinton pardons. He thinks that most of the Bush Administration’s legal responses to al-Qaida were, at a minimum, ill-advised and, at maximum, illegal. Like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Holder’s likely to skate to confirmation too.

Then we have Tim Geithner, nominated as Secretary of the Treasury. His tax embarrassments need no elaboration here and, as a defense lawyer, I wish him well. After all, if the statute of limitations has run, why pay the money? Never volunteer.

But what does concern me is that the Banking Committee’s investigation has undercovered that, as this housing and credit bubble built towards its inevitable end, our new Treasury Secretary and his wife surfed that wave with considerable skill, buying one home after another and, then, each time, pulling most of the equity out via a home equity loan. In other words: Secretary Geithner was either (a) blind to the reality of the disease metastasizing in the American economy or (b) joyfully complicit in it. I wish somebody’d ask him which it was.

Doesn’t either explanation disqualify him?

Yet no Republican, in light of the abuses of the Bush Years, has the moral authority to initiate an effective filibuster to block these nominations.

Second, we have the presence of two corrupt and complicit elected officials — U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. — at the head of our two congressional financial services committees. In the sort of irony Henry Adams would have savored, Messers. Frank and Dodd are charged with fixing a mess which they helped create. And they’re going to do it with our money.

Third, of course, we have the deficit. But, again, the problem is that it was the Bush Republicans who first betrayed the Reagan Revolution and looted the federal treasury.

Last, we have the move towards socializing the U.S. economy, which will only gain strength when the president’s proposed stimulus package fails to achieve its goal. But the Republicans’ credibility gap makes proposing a successful alternative unlikely. Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke — and willfully blind regulators — have undone over a century of Republican orthodoxy.

So, we’re left to kibbitz about Michelle Obama’s latest outfit and coo at the new President’s gestures towards transparency and the rule of law (Maybe he’ll authorize the State of Hawaii to release his original birth certificate now?). Meanwhile, Rome burns.

[IbJensen]

Get rid of one socialist globalist and get one much worse who appears, indeed, to be a fruit.

[The Sons of Liberty]

Sadly, I guess it’s true “you can’t be forever blessed...”