President Obama’s main method for making appointments to the highest bureaucratic posts remains in place today, to wit, recognizing and rewarding a lack of integrity. Since tax-dodging is a form of lying, one remembers the appointments four years ago of Tim Geithner to Treasury and Tom Daschle to HHS. It didn’t matter with Geithner, whom the president reckoned was indispensable.
However, after coughing up well over $100,000 (and maybe jail time), Daschle went back under the rocks, losing his grubstake. Bill Richardson, for Commerce, fell through because the New Mexico governor was under investigation by the Federals for something or other having to do with contracting (what else in light of campaign funds?). There were other tax-cheats who dropped out of their appointments, but who was counting anyway? Surely bureaucrats, of all people, have the right to skip taxes – they belong to the machinery, like the IRS folks currently under the magnifying glass for a little bit of everything evil.
Laughably, Justice Sotomayor was being confirmed to the SCOTUS at the same time that it was learned that she had skipped the proper protocols for handling an Appeals case (another form of dishonesty) and at the same time her ruling was being overturned by the SCOTUS, mandating that ethnicity did not trump eligibility in the matter of Fire Dept. promotions. A fifth-grader would have known she was wrong but she sits on the SCOTUS today to attempt to similarly twist the law in any way she can.
This brings up the latest appointments, to wit, Susan Rice to be the head honcho of the NSC (not subject to Senate confirmation, not that it would matter) and Samantha Power to take her place as U.S. ambassador to the UN. The latter faces confirmation and perhaps will explain what she meant back in the day when she catalogued Hillary Clinton as a monster who would stoop to most anything. Maybe that wasn’t being dishonest so cut Power some slack.
Ah yes…Hillary! She was the epitome of prevarication in 2008 when she graphically described running for her life in Bosnia from those evil snipers in 1996. She was joined in that terrifying moment by daughter Chelsea. At the end of her run (actually stepping down from a plane), she was greeted by a little girl and local officials. It was all a lie so, naturally, she was appointed State Secretary by Obama.
Oh well…isn’t lying the main thing regarding diplomacy? More recently, Clinton lied about the Benghazi massacre, blaming it all on an innocuous amateur film that appeared on U-Tube for 13 minutes. In this, she was joined in the Rose Garden and later at the UN by Obama, whose whereabouts on the night of the Benghazi attack are still unknown. He hasn’t said.
Continuing with the subject of lying vis-à-vis the State Department, John Kerry now holds the post. He said back in the day that U.S. GIs wasted 200,000 Vietnamese civilians a year during the Vietnamese conflict. That makes Syria’s Assad appear as a saint by comparison. Iraq’s Saddam wasted only 400,000 in 25 years or so. So…on the basis of ability to lie, Kerry has earned his job. That works out to about 2 million dead civilians…say 1963-73. Of course, he was a mediocre student at Yale so why should Kerry be expected to excel mathematically?
Of course, Kerry got the job only because the new NSC director told an outrageous whopper on five TV talk-shows regarding Benghazi. In line for the State job as noted by Obama, Rice’s lie was even bigger than Hillary’s since people were actually killed. She repeated the Clinton/Obama BIG LIE about the insipid movie and INSISTED that the massacre was not an act of terrorism.
All the while, the administration, with her as an integral part, knew the truth. Acting as a party-hack (Clinton wouldn’t touch those essentially friendly talk-shows), she took the dive, probably hoping the friendly media would not call her on it. She was mistaken and Obama knew that getting that kind of liar confirmed for State would be just too embarrassing, even though the Senate democrats would have confirmed her, though not if cloture became an issue.
It’s scary that Rice is at the NSC (all those government secrets) but she and Power, along with Obama and Kerry, are proof positive that the government is either being run by the Keystone Kops or an integrity-bereft administration. Both possibilities seem operative.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
No comments:
Post a Comment