Saturday, December 13, 2008

Democrat Politics 2.0 : The Obama Upgrade


Let’s admit: the comparisons are real. Bill Clinton brought in a cloud of scandals when he and Hill schlepped their way into our lives, just like Barry and Michelle are about to accomplish.

With Bill Clinton, the White House was home to a pair of Arkansas lawyers who had their hands in as many shady (corrupt) schemes you can get away with, seeing them snowball from the ‘92 primary to the ‘94 subpoena of Rose Law Firm records, which held clues if they hadn’t already been thoroughly sanitized.

After dodging repeated subpoenas for 2 years [could you or I get away with ignoring a court-ordered subpoena for 2 years?], in 1996, Hill made history as the only First Lady ever called to testify before a Grand Jury inquiry.

Despite dodging would-be scandals in the two-year primary season, we see in Barry the emergence of “candidate-with-a-past”, starting with what seems innocent, almost quaint concerns: Is he a secret Muslim?, Did he get sworn in to the Senate with his hand on the Quran?, What’s up with that name? etc, then graduating to deeper, more character-defining choices he made along the way: If you can sell out to Bill Ayers, is there anything you won’t sell out? How can you say you never knew of your spiritual mentor’s core message if you sat in his audience for 20 years, named one of your life-lesson autobiographies after one of his speeches, and walked past the lobby kiosks in his church that were peddling the very dvd videos of the reverend’s hate-filled message?

Soon after the primary season was over, Hill and Bill set forth on erecting their legacy. Some of it not so good (”Don’t ask, don’t tell”, Waco, the 1993 WTC bombing), but there, nonetheless, for the press to ignore. (How often do we hear of the innocent people that Janet Reno and Bill Clinton killed in that Justice Dept/Army tank engagement? It seems lost to history.) Their spree ended up graduating from billing fraud, bimbo eruptions, and travelgate to darker, more sinister levels: Vince Foster, James McDougal, Ron Brown, Mary Mahoney, to name just a few. (see a list here)

It looks like our election-season scandalizing caps off with a “pay-to-play” embroglio which, at this writing, seems to be a whirlpool of Chicago Politics which hasn’t YET caught our man-boy Barry in it’s undertow. I say yet because federal prosecutor Fitzgerald acted just in time to contain the contanimation to only the Illinois governor’s office. Patrick may know that the Obama office had contacted the Blagojevich office in order to “play”, but both parties, that is Emanuel and Patrick, are keeping quiet. Throw the governor overboard in a string of Resko-type associations that we will have to brace ourselves for during the next four or eight years.

Flaws and overspending aside, George W Bush, his father, and Reagan never brought in this kind of darkness to the White House. For the past US generation, we have been treated to deeply flawed, corrupt, and murderous Democrats. Obama is simply continuing the pattern.

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