Hmmm, it took reading on Instapundit that it was US Senator Charles Schumer (DEMOCRAT-NY) whose latest reckless behavior two weeks ago (added to zillions of other examples before), caused the bank run at IndyMac which resulted in the Federal Government taking it over.   Funny how the MSM isn’t mentioning it at all in their saturated IndyMac coverage over the weekend.

So in addition to sparking fear among IndyMac customers, Senator Schumer has cost you and me (taxpayers) potentially billions of dollars from our pockets.

Way to go, jackass!  (Hey, it IS the Democrat Party mascot; Schumer is just representing it well.)

If the IndyMac panic sparks other bank runs, perhaps Schumer will be responsible for millions of other Americans panicking and sparking the return of Hoovervilles SchumerVilles.

(Photo courtesy of BusinessWeek.com)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Senator Reid may well be the most incompetent man ever to be in charge of the United States Senate.

Political Maneuvers Delay Bill-After-Bill In The Senate - Washington Post

The Senate went home yesterday for the Fourth of July holiday to face voters, having failed repeatedly to address critical economic issues from skyrocketing gas prices to climate change to the nation’s housing crisis.

Leaders in both parties have vowed to tackle those problems. Yet the Senate has been unable to move forward even when there is broad agreement about what to do.

<….>

Senators in both parties say the logjam is the worst they’ve seen, largely due to copious use of the filibuster. Since January 2007, motions to end debate — cloture motions — have been filed 119 times. The previous record for any two-year session was 82.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has used a procedural tactic to prohibit GOP amendments 13 times since January 2007, more than any Senate leader since 1985.

Republicans point to those statistics and accuse Reid of using cloture to deny them the ability to amend legislation often chosen for its political message.

Gee, remind me which minority-status party at-the-time began the requirement of 60 votes for passage of ANY item in the Senate?   One guess only, please.

It is unbelieveable to comprehend that Reid make (Not-My) Speaker Pelosi look smart, witty, and intelligent.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Back in June of 1992 when speaking to a gathering of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, then-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton, repudiated the African-American hip-hop artist/activist Lisa Williamson (AKA Sister Souljah) for her comments suggesting blacks should stop killing blacks and should instead “have a week” where they “kill white people.”

This became the first “Sister Souljah moment” where a politician excoriates an extremist associated with his political party in order to distance himself from such extremism and better appeal to the political center as Bill Clinton did so well in the 1992 campaign and indeed throughout his political career (well, except his first two years in the White House).

Now, his successor as presumptive Democratic nominee has a great opportunity for his own Sister Souljah moment. Via Instapundit, we learn that the Reverend Al Sharpton, a radical activist to whom Democratic presidential candidates traditionally pander despite his demagogic history, faces federal scrutiny with the “IRS sending out a flurry of subpoenas to his most generous corporate donors.”

While Sharpton calls this a “fishing expedition,”

The IRS and the US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn have an ongoing probe into Sharpton’s finances going back to his 2004 run for president and stewardship of NAN [Sharpton's National Action Network].

Last year, [Democratic New York] state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began a probe of NAN because it failed to follow state financial-disclosure regulations for nonprofits.

Obama should demand that Sharpton and his donors comply with the subpoenas and promise that in an Obama Administration, the Justice Department would aggressively pursue this investigation, filing charges when warranted. He would say further that he believes the facts warrant an investigation given that “As of 2006, the most recent year that financial documents for the group [NAN] are publicly available, it owed $1.9 million in payroll taxes and penalties.“

Sharpton wouldn’t be able to play the race card against Obama (though he will certainly try). Obama’s candor on this issue could help distance himself from the angry New York minister. And could even have the added benefit of silencing this charlatan.

Poor Richard Cohen. That ‘great and noble’ Party he has spent years pinning his hopes and dreams upon has truly let him down. What hast Hillary & Obama wrought? Why, a “campaign to hate” which he finds to be “frightening”:

So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. (Washington Post)

He even invoked the ‘Venerable Bard’ in this criticism of his fellow Democrats. Ouch. This is what happens, Richard, when you invest everything in identity politics instead of quality of character. The latter is about far more than just whether your candidate is a ‘nice guy’, looks good on TV or even speaks well. What this whole mess quite clearly demonstrates is the truth of why style over substance is usually a bad prospect in choosing one’s leaders.

– John (Average Gay Joe)

As Hillary’s quest for the Democratic nomination which once seemed inevitable now seems impossible, a number of people are speculating why she lost.

I have long believed her personality would make it difficult for Mrs. Clinton to win. In this campaign, as Karl Rove put it she “came across as calculating, contrived, stiff and self-concerned.” Contrast that with Obama’s charismatic presence, making it even more difficult for her to convince people of her ability to lead and unie the nation.

To be sure, in the debates (and some of her TV interviews–a format she had shunned in the early days of the campaign), she impressed many (including yours truly) with her intelligence and command of the issues. But, it didn’t seem to make much difference.

That may have a lot to with the kind of campaign she ran. In Time, Karen Tumulty identifies the Five Mistakes Hillary Made. This is a good essay, where Tumulty identifies only the flaws in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. There was far more to her loss than mistakes on the trail.

To be sure, had Mrs. Clinton run a better campaign, she might have been able to pull it off. In addition to her personality, I think two other factors accounted for her loss, the first related to her character, that being the issue of trust. And the second being the media.

(more…)

Shortly after posting my piece where I put forward my belief that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over, I perused the blogs to read what others were saying about the state of the campaign.

Hugh wrote he didn’t expect Hillary “to bail, at least not until the final primaries are held and the Tony Rezko trial verdict in. (Final arguments open Monday.)” He observed:

. . . if Rezko is convicted and is facing a long stretch in jail, won’t he have to think long and hard about naming names in order to limit his years in federal prison? Clearly Rezko and Obama are close. That’s a huge potential nightmare for the Dems, and Team Hillary won’t be shy about underscoring the dangers of an unfolding scandal consuming Chicago politics.

While it may be a little far-fetched, it’s still within the realm of possibility that Rezko has some damaging information on the likely Democratic ominee. Perhaps, Hillary is clinging to this as her last best hope to return to the White House.

Just as some lefty bloggers assumed Scooter Libby would implicate the Vice President, some in the Hillary camp may well be hoping that Rezko implicates Obama.

What a delicious irony that would be, if some scandal brings Obama’s presidential bid to a halt and puts Hillary on the path to the White House when numerous scandals failed to prevent her husband from getting there and failed to evict him from that prestigious property before his lease was up.

In the runup to last week’s Pennsylvania primary, we heard so much about Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama’s comment about the bitterness of rural voters in he Keystone State that the media paid relatively little attention to Bill Clinton’s approximately simultaneous attempt to justify his wife’s misrepresentations of a trip she took as First Lady to Bosnia.  His arrogance kept us from hearing more about the Clintons’ deceptions.

This past week, with media focus on the latest rantings of Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois Democrat’s former pastor, and some of the Senator’s other radical personal associations Hillary emerges as the sober alternative to her suddenly controversial challenger. Indeed, some leftists believe Wright is being paid to keep talking.

With this preacher in the news, the media has been giving short shrift to Mrs. Clinton’s own scandal. It seems she’s improving in the polls not so much because of her focus on issues (as she claims), but because she is the only Democratic alternative to Obama.

To be sure, a few bloggers took note of her inability to use a convenience store coffee machine. But, that story didn’t garner as much attention as Geroge H.W. Bush’s curiosity about a supermarket scanner. Guess, it’s only a story when a Republican seems out of touch with the modern technology we common folk use every day.

As Ms. Hillary escapes a media onslaught to which she would fall victim were there an (R) after her name, John F. Harris and Jim Vandenhei list some issues Obama would like the former First Lady to address (Via Volokh via Glenn). As they note, her rival’s supporters might argue that not all “Clinton controversies” have been “fully ventilated.”

(more…)

. . . . were I an investigative journalist.

If I were an investigative political journalist, there are three books I would like to write. Well, if that were my profession and I had the opportunity, I would have already completed two of them and would currently working on the third.

The first two would be about the Clinton Administration. One would look into how the Democratic president’s staff failed to prevent the then-president’s bimbo eruptions from metastasizing into a scandal. Had any one of his advisors warned Clinton that his private indiscretions could become public knowledge?

The second book would be a happier one for the Democrats. It would show how a man who, in 1992, had worked to prevent Bill Clinton from winning the Democratic nomination had, in the mid-1990s, all but saved his Administration. I would look at how Mike McCurry, White House press secretary from 1995-98 helped the then-president recover from the loss of Congress to the GOP and deal with the aftershocks of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

McCurry succeeded in spinning these stories to minimize the damage to the Clinton himself, his Administration and perhaps even his legacy.

By the time McCurry stepped down in October 1998, Republicans’ focus on the then-president’s peccadilloes enabled the Democrats to win seats as the party more serious about governing despite the then-Democratic president’s reckless behavior. My book would also consider the question Howard Kurtz posed in writing about McCurry’s last White House daily briefing: “How can a man who denies, obfuscates and beats up on reporters be so popular with the White House press corps?“

McCurry’s popularity was an essential aspect of his success. (Working on this piece, I wondered if McCurry had written a book about his White House years, but when I looked him up on amazon, found the only book he had written was the forward to a media relations handbook–a field where he certainly excels.)

The volume I would now be working on right would, in many ways be the opposite of my study of Mike McCurry’s role in rescuing the Clinton Administration. In this study, I would consider why the Bush Administrations failed to develop an effective means to respond to policy setbacks and adverse stories in the news. As I’ve been pondering where the president went wrong, I keep coming back to what James Taranto calls the “Plame kerfuffle.”

(more…)

Just a week ago, I wondered if Hillary had picked up her mendacity in the course of her relationship with Bill, but if this story proves to be true, it seems her deception goes back as far as one of her first jobs in politics.

According to Jerry Zeifman, lifelong Democrat and former general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee where he “supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation,” the then-young attorney “wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.” She claimed there was no right to counsel during impeachment proceedings despite precedent for such counsel.

When Zeifman told her that there were documents helping establish this precedent, she removed the relevant files from an office where they were publicly accessible to offices where they were not. This so she could claim there was “no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding.”

Hmm. . . does that removal remind you of something?

There’s more to the story than this. So check out Ed Morrissey’s source. If true, we would see that Hillary learned the types of behavior that came to define her family’s tenure in the White House long before she got to the White House, before even her sojourn in Arkansas.

The Democratic former governor of New Jersey and Advocate cover boy Jim McGreevey is back in the news. A judge yesterday dismissed his ex-wife’s “claim of emotional distress.” Meanwhile, Jamie Kirchik reminds us that this Democrat’s scandal “wasn’t just about sex.”

McGreevey wasn’t just engaged in extramarital trysts with men, he was also putting them on the state payroll. While Jamie acknowledges the “eagerness of gays to champion the [ex-]Governor of the Garden State,” given the “paucity of openly gay people in public affairs,” he finds:

McGreevey inadvertently hurt the cause of gay civil rights as much as any crusading, socially conservative political activist could have hoped to do. He fed the stereotype that gays are untrustworthy and self-absorbed, and that homosexuality is a personal weakness

Exactly. And yet the Advocate put him on its cover.

In a headline on another cover, that “national gay & lesbian news magzine” accused an open lesbian of “copping out” because Mary Cheney didn’t say what they wanted her to say in her memoir, Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life.

Hmm, here we have a lesbian comfortable in her sexuality, faithful to her partner and close to her family, a woman who is anything but self-absorbed, even having the courage to come out in conservative circles and the Advocate dismisses her writing. Guess it must be that parenthetical letter after her name. That (R) seems to make one anathema to gay activists and journalists while that (D) excuses them of all wrongdoing.

If we really want to promote a positive image of gay men and lesbians in American society, gay leaders as well as our advocates in the media would be condemning the conduct of men like Jim McGreevey and wishing more people like Mary Cheney would be open about their sexuality.

A reader alerted me to this article reporting that the Detroit City Council had voted by a margin of 7-1, calling on Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to resign. The reporter did not mention the Mayor’s partisan affiliation. Nor did he mention the party of U.S. Rep. John E. Conyers whose wife cast the lone dissenting vote.

Why does the MSM find it so important to list the partisan affiliation of a Republican who gets his hands caught in the cookie jar (or, as in recent scandals) with his pants down, but leaves us to guess when a member of the other party gets in trouble.

Guess it’s that when a Democrat does it, it’s an isolated occurrence, but when a Republican does it, it’s a sign of a trend, proof of that party’s corruption, greed, hypocrisy or some combination thereof.

UPDATE: Seems a Corner reader had a similar thought. In an e-mail to Jonah Goldberg, he wrote:

When conservatives are involved in scandals the scandals are treated as Republican Party scandals. However, Democrats involved in scandals are mere individuals who happen to be involved in scandals.

Please check below for a rebuttal from the reader whose e-mail inspired this post.

When a reader e-mailed me this morning, claiming, “sex scandals in the US seems lopsided toward the Republican side of things,” I wrote back saying that, in my impression, there were more Democratic than Republican ones. I based my comment not on any scientific survey, but on my own recollection, having followed the news pretty regularly for the past twenty-five years.

I wondered if my friend’s impression were based not on his bias (he tends to vote Democratic) but on that of the media, given that they seem to delight more in Republican scandals than Democratic ones, not merely because of the various reporters’ left-of-center leanings, but also because of the hypocrisy angle. They want to show that while Republicans may talk family values, they can’t walk the walk.

They use this supposed hypocrisy so as to more easily dismiss conservative arguments.

Numerous conservative bloggers, led by Glenn Reynolds (e.g., here), have observed how frequently MSM outlets make sure to reference a politician’s affiliation if he’s a Republican caught in a sex scandal, but somehow that doesn’t seem necessary to point out when it’s a Democrat.

Perhaps, that accounts for my friend’s sense that there are more GOP scandals.

Not only that. Republican sexual scandals fit into the MSM theory of sex, inspired by Freud and propagated by pop psychology and pop culture, that only sexually repressed people will seek out sex is secretive and seedy surroundings. Hence, the appeal of the Larry Craig story. A gay man denies his sexuality, thus forces himself to seek trysts in public restrooms.

Yet, if sexual repression were the reason people sought out such secretive sex, what explains former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s shenanigans? Or Carl McGee’s? McGee, an openly gay man and aide to Massachusetts’s Democratic governor, who had married his partner, was arrested for having sex with a teenager in a public steamroom. (Note how the article on McGee doesn’t indicate his party affiliation.)

The national media didn’t pick up on this story because it didn’t fit into their narrative of gay sex scandals.

(more…)

Isn’t it nice to have a politician embroiled in a sex scandal which gets national media attention and does not involve gay sex?

Upon learning that Hillary Fundraiser Dickie Scruggs pled guilty “to conspiring to bribe a judge for a favorable rulingin a case involving legal fees from a post-Hurricane Katrina lawsuit.” I wondered if the Clinton campaign (perhaps a phone call from Bill himself) had persuaded the trial lawyer to reach this decision. (Walter Olson (via Glenn) has more here.)

After all, with the Rezko trial underway in Chicago, a handful of media outlets are focusing on the shenanigans of that Obama fundraiser. Better to keep the shady dealings of Hillary supporters out of the news. With a guilty plea, there won’t be a trial, thus nothing to write about (after today). (It may be tough to keep felonious Clinton fundraisers out of the news I just read another one “is back in court.”)

Note how the plea comes on a Friday. It has long been a Clinton tactic to deliver bad news on a Friday when people are thinking less of politics and more of the weekend. I daresay this plea won’t get much media attention (outside Missisippi-and hey, their primary was earlier this week.)

It’s been Clinton practice to pardon those who help them out. Maybe Bill promised Dickie a pardon should Hillary win the White House.

Last night, while at a mixer in Hollywood, I ran into a friendly Democratic acquaintance. The last time I had seen him, he was singing the praises of his man for ‘08, John Edwards. While we don’t agree on politics, last night we did wonder the same thing, why would a man as smart as Eliot Spitzer be so stupid as to get caught up in the same kind of prostitution ring that he had twice prosecuted?

Why we wondered, do smart people do stupid things? And Eliot Spitzer is not the first smart person to do a stupid thing.

While I’m no fan of his politics nor his tactics as a prosecutor, I do admire his political skill. He went from losing the 1994 race for New York State Attorney General to winning the 2006 race for Governor, with the largest percentage of the vote any gubernatorial candidate had received in New York.

Just over a year ago, people were talking about him as a future contender for the White House. Now, based on mistakes of his own making, he’s little more than a has-been. And the butt of jokes on late-night television.

It seemed that only his arrogance could account for his foolishness. He thought he was too smart to get caught.

Perhaps, it was more than that. After “publishing” my last post and lunching with a friend (the very reader who helped inspire that post by linking Gallagher’s article), I returned here to check the blogs where I followed Glenn Reynolds’ link to Kimberly Strassel’s piece, “Spitzer’s Media Enablers.”

The piece merits a wide audience, so make sure to read the whole thing. As Glenn notes, Strassel found that instead of “keeping tabs on public officials” (as should be their job), the press “acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it.” And then I caught this: “The press was foursquare behind Mr. Spitzer in all these cases” (against high profile corporate targets). Foursquare behind his overzealous prosecution of big companies? Was it that his agenda reflected his own?  They had similar worldviews.

Did this Democrat think he could get away with his indiscretions because the MSM liked what he was doing? He wouldn’t be the first Democrat with such an attitude.

Had I first encountered Athena in the Iliad, I would likely be writing my dissertation on another deity–or mythological theme. While in the Odyssey, she appears as a noble figure, eager to help her favorite Odysseus home and to facilitate his reconciliation with his son, in the epic of the Trojan War, she is a real bitch, hardly sympathetic.

And the cause for her outrage seems rather petty. She felt slighted when the Trojan prince Paris chose Aphrodite over her and Hera as the “fairest” of the three.* In a rare alliance with her stepmother, the gray-eyed goddess resolved to destroy the city of Troy for its prince’s choice, even preventing a truce which would have ended the war and stopped the slaughter.

In many ways, the role of Athena and Hera in the Iliad is an illustration of William Congreve’s maxim “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

Now that Eliot Spitzer’s scandals have drawn his wife into the spotlight, let’s hope that Silda Wall embodies the qualities that Athena and Hera manifested in the Trojan War, initiating divorce proceedings against her husband. And not those that Hera embodied throughout her life, trying to get back into her consort’s good graces.

I feel for Mrs. Spitzer — and her three daughters. It’s a strike against her husband — and a severe one at that — that he didn’t consider how his indiscretions would harm his family should they become public — as they often do for public figures.

Reflecting on how the soon-to-be former Governor, just like another disgraced Democratic governor (Jim McGreevey) confessing his sexual indiscretions, had his wife by his side when he acknowledged his guilt, Maggie Gallagher asks:

But can we at least end this barbaric practice of dragging your wife before the cameras while you confess your shameful guilt? If she wasn’t there in the hotel room when you did your crime, don’t ask her to do your time.

Athena may have overreacted during the Trojan War, but at least she refused to be complicit in a man’s shaming of her. Let us hope that women learn from her (in attitude but not in scale) in responding to the humiliations they suffer from men who don’t honor their obligations — marital and otherwise.

——–

*In many ways Spitzer’s prostitutes are modern incarnations of Aphrodite, the Olympian ever eager to disrobe and bed her fellow deities (and even a mortal or two).

Welcome Instapundit Readers!! 

During the last sex scandal involving a prominent politician, I contended that the real issue was not so much the scandal’s lurid details or the politician’s hypocrisy, but Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s “absence of judgment.” Here again, the issue seems to be judgment, but there is much more to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s woes than that.

If the only issue were the Democratic governor’s use of prostitutes, I might agree with his statement yesterday that this is “a private matter” where he, in his words, merely violated “obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong.” To be sure, there would be the added issue of whether a man who took his marriage vow so lightly might also show a similar disregard for other vows he had taken, namely his oath of office of governor of New York.

Being pretty libertarian, I oppose the criminalization of prostitution. This is not to say I believe prostitution to be a good thing, just that I think it don’t think it should be illegal. On that score, Governor Spitzer’s actions are, as he said, a private mattter.

That said, however, this is a man who, for eight years, was chief law enforcer for the nation’s third largest state. In that capacity, his job was to enforce the law. Someone like that should respect the laws–or use his position to push for their repeal. Not only that. A state attorney general chooses the cases he prosecutes and he chose to prosecute “at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.“

That’s not all. He appears to have involved in structuring, moving money around to “obscure the true purpose of his payments” to the prostitutes. The issue here was as much financial as it was sexual (Via Instapundit).

If Larry Craig’s foot-tapping had not been in a public place, that would indeed have been a private matter and not merited media scrutiny. And for the Idaho Republican, it wasn’t just that one episode. He had been the subject of rumors regarding similar behavior in another public restroom ten months nearly a year before his scandal broke. That should have served as a reminder to him that what one does in a public space could easily become public knowledge.

As Governor Spitzer, ambitious man that he is, should also have been aware that would he called a “private matter” could easily become public knowledge. I mean, he prosecuted not one, but two, prostitution rings.

Or was it his arrogance? Like another smart and politically savvy Democrat, did he think he could get away with his sexual shenaningans?

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Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

Since declining comment yesterday on the woes of the governor of her adopted home state, Hillary Clinton has remained mum on this disgraced Democrat. (H/t Glenn Reynolds’ excellent list of links on this scandal.)

No wonder. This is a “nightmare for Hillary,” as Roger Simon puts it, since “this kind of public sexual hypocrisy reminds people of one person only more than others: William Jefferson Clinton.”

She just can’t come out and say Spitzer should resign. That might come across as forced and hypocritical given how she continually stood by her man when his various indiscrettions came to light.

This scandal makes Americans wonder if we want a repeat of the 1990s, having the drama of an unfaithful Chief Executive (in this case, First Spouse) back on center stage, along with the scandals associated with her husband’s Administration.

Democratic scandals remind voters of the downside of the Clinton years. And this particular one more so than many of the less reported ones.

UPDATE: In linking this post, Eugene Volokh finds it “hard to condemn” Hillary for her silence, finding it a “loyal” “kind” and “political savvy thing to do.” He offers other reasons for her silence, including this one: “Any substantive statements she makes on this topic seem likely to play into the common public image of her as schoolmarmish and scolding.” Good points all.