Here’s your chance. I know you are disappointed with the Obama administration. But I want you to tell me why they are one of the most corrupt administrations on record. Whatever faults they may have, leave those aside and tell me how they are corrupt. Who should resign in disgrace not for being less than able but for being on the take?
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I suspect many will say Tim Geithner. I’d disagree with that assessment, but it seems to me that’s really the only person I’ve heard referred to as “corrupt.”
Put me in the Geithner column.
You may not agree with Geithner, but you have no reason to call him corrupt.
he’s only as corrupt as the system he oversees. By that standard it’s probably Salazar who is the most corrupt, and he hasn’t done anything illegal that I know about.
Who besides Republicans has ever said that Obama is corrupt? The progressive critique of Obama has and always will be very straightforward and one that you, Booman, don’t always address head on: In the process of enacting his agenda and dealing with the economic crisis inherited from Bush, he lost control of the politics, potentially putting those very policy gains, his reelection in 2012, and the future progressive policies at risk. There’s really not much more to it than that. Obama defenders can say that policy is more important than politics or that it was a price worth paying, or that it was inevitable given our conservative political institutions, but Axelrod’s defense that good policy is good politics is laughable.
Issa is being a good soldier here- his job is to push the Obama is corrupt meme, maybe it catches on, maybe it doesn’t. No harm in trying though, because Republicans don’t believe our political institutions have any purpose other than to serve their own political interests.
Again, lots of harm trying!! Given how easily they manipulate the media, they won’t have to try too hard.
Better to paint that car alarm crank as the second coming of Dan Burton–he of the shooting watermelon in his backyard to “prove” that Vince Foster was murdered–who will be taking his marching orders from Drug Rush.
Fight this crap. Don’t assume it will blow over. It will not. They’re on a fishing expedition to see what they can catch, but they’ll find something and make it the equivalent of death panels. That’s a promise.
Oh, and BTW–Happy New Year! :<)
Here’s my guess at Darrell Issa’s thinking. He’s going to investigate all of the corruption of the Bush administration and hang it around Obama because Obama has not successfully stopped it yet; therefore, Obama is more corrupt than Bush. Plus he will highlight the past of Obama’s auto czar. And finally the GOP will trace the financial crisis back to Goldman Sachs and Citibank — and Robert Rubin and his protoges. And with that as a firm footing, Issa will just invent stuff that the media will parrot.
Who should resign? Whoever remains who staffed Obama’s personnel selection effort. It is stupid to send appointees to the Senate who have tax payment problems (Geithner, Daschle,…). Or who have skeletons in their closet from their days in the holding pattern of the revolving door — Holder, Summers. And not moving quickly to get burrowed in Bushies out of the civil service might prove to be a problem; they might provide Issa with accusations that the administration might have to spend time defending itself against.
But most of the really prime candidates are gone already.
Might be useful for DOJ to do a bipartisan investigation of the revolving door with K Street and whether any laws were broken. Or initiate a through investigation of antitrust violations. But such an aggressive approach is not Obama’s easy-going Hawaiian style.
It’s the fucking czars!!! Hoards of them. None approved by Congress with no accountability!!! And no fucking transparency!!! Of course they are fucking corrupt! Who knows what the fuck they are doing and they could get away with anything! So of course they are! Wouldn’t you if you had unlimited power and no accountability!?! You’d steal the nation blind, because that’s what we are… Fucking blind!!! Blind to what they are doing!!! I bet they are torturing people and we don’t even know it! And they thought Bush was bad. Worse, these folks are from Chicago and you know what that means. Chicago politics. Say no more. Capone was from Chicago. Dead people vote in Chicago. You don’t even have to live there to run for mayor!!!
Is it just me, or is it becoming increasingly difficult to discern parody in the political sphere these days?
yes, sometimes the only way is to know the poster’s previous comments.
Off topic, but it would be hard to exaggerate how enthralled Finn is with Springsteen’s Born to Run (the album, not just the song).
He even loves Night.
And, by the way, isn’t this perfect?
What really concerns me is: why are you asking this stupid question? Of course, the Obama administration isn’t the “corruptest” administration on record. And you aren’t the least bit serious in asking. As usual, I am extremely suspicious of your motives but this insanity is taking the cake.
You can say may many things about the Obama administration. But they don’t even have the whiff of corruption.
Any man who says that oil doesn’t spill (LOL!) and throws his innocent, minor child into the Gulf of Mexico to “prove” “nothing’s wrong” I will call corrupt. Corruption doesn’t equate “illegal.” Let’s not play around with semantics, buddy!
I think Issa’s investigations, besides being self-serving, are not interested so much in “corruption” in the money-graft way. I believe he means it to imply “illegitimate.” This goes back to ACORN, illegal people voting, and so on. From there anything that Obama got done is illegitimate and/or corrupt. The system has been corrupted.
Of course, Citizens United didn’t corrupt the system at all, now, did it??
Rules to remember:
Hint:
Pretty slick. Ninety days before an election in which the “Contract
withon America” was the key platform item.If you believe that any polititian who is on the take from the kleptocracy is corrupt, then you must include Obama in that group.
Issa outlines his focus (per TPM):
The only way that he wins with this lineup is through the corruption of the corporate media. And my expectation is that they will live up to their responsibilities in this regard, Chris Matthews leading the way.
Fasten your seat belts. If you thought the 1990s were turbulent, and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth craven, and Jerome Corsi’s celebrity for having written Obama Nation despicable, you are about to witness the next advance in GOP smearing. Rove’s strategy (at least the items that win): Hit them where they have strengths and do the math.
The Democratic counterpart of this would be a 3080-county campaign beginning now, and hitting the Republican Party on their national security smarts, fiscal discipline, and toughness, and a popular history of the rise of the conservative Republican movement and the Great Wurlitzer (with free copies to every library in the nation). These are within the capabilities of the national Democratic Party. None of them will happen, for reasons I really don’t understand.