GOOD thing for Barack Obama that he isn’t George Bush. He’d have been slaughtered for starting so badly that he’s picking a Cabinet of tax cheats. . . .
how loudly would the people who cheer Obama have screamed if Bush had, for instance, surrounded himself with this extraordinarily long list of spivs and chiselers?
There’s Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader whom Obama picked as Health secretary, but was forced to quit for having failed to pay more than $150,000 in taxes – and for pulling a mysterious $1.5 million a year as an influence-peddler to a law firm.
Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice as the government’s chief performance officer, also had to quit, having failed to pay unemployment taxes for her household help.
Timothy Geithner, on the other hand, still got appointed Treasury secretary despite having also failed to pay taxes – more than $60,000 in his case. Hilda Solis likewise survived, becoming Labor secretary even though her husband owed $10,000 in taxes.
Hmm. What is it about Big Government Democrats that they so hate paying the taxes they impose on others? And we haven’t finished with that list, either.
Obama’s first choice as Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, had to quit to fight grand jury charges of selling favors. . . .And now helping Obama run the economy are two powerful Democratic Congressmen he’s inherited from his party – Charlie Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing House ways and means Committee, who failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his luxury Caribbean villa, and Chris Dodd, who as chair of the Senate banking committee received $200,000 in donations from the now collapsed Fannie Mae, plus sweetheart loans from Countrywide Financial, another business he was supposed to be regulating.
Not being able even to pick a clean team would be embarrassing enough – proof that the neophyte in the White House has run nothing in his life but an election campaign – but worse is that Obama actually promised to transform Washington with “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.
Ouch. And that doesn’t even get to the latest Greg Craig revelations. But I like “spivs and chancers.”