Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies

“Byrdes of on kynde and color flok and flye allwayes together.”

—WILLIAM TURNER, CIRCA 1545

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

—GEORGE WASHINGTON

“The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference.”

—BESS MYERSON

FOR THE WHISTLEBLOWERS

*FOREWORD TO PAPERBACK EDITION*

2010

THE ANTI - CORRUPTION REFERENDUM

C
an I say “I told you so” now? In July 2009, when
Culture of Corruption
was first released, liberal critics scoffed:
How could you possibly write a 400-page book about Barack Obama’s rotten administration when he’s only been in office six months?!

When I proceeded to rattle off case after case of Chicago-style back-scratching, transparency-trampling, and crooked special interest-dealing in the new White House, liberal critics such as
The View
’s Joy Behar interjected:

B-b-b-but what about Bush? Why don’t you write a book about Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush?
¹

When I pointed out that I had reported extensively on cronyism in the Bush era (see Harriett Miers, FEMA, and the Department of Homeland Security), and when I further pointed out that while the Bush-bashing market overfloweth, there remained a massive vacuum of critical analysis of Obama, liberal critics sputtered:

So what? Doesn’t every administration have corruption?

When I patiently explained that no other administration in modern American history has set itself up as loftily as the Hope and Change reformers had done, or when I cited endless examples of Obama’s broken promises on everything from lobbyists to transparency to Washington business-as-usual, liberal critics changed the subject again.

Potty-mouthed Leftist comedian Bill Maher mocked the cover of the book (“Ooh, look, Obama f**ked up the flag”) and griped that I wouldn’t go on his cable TV show.
²
Matt Lauer of NBC’s
Today Show
played beat the clock, stalling with questions about President Obama’s infamous Beer Summit and the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor before objecting to my characterization of First Lady Michelle Obama as the “First Crony.” (I got the last word. He answered with a smirk.)
³

While media groupies continued to churn out glowing West Wing profiles and East Wing fashion updates in exchange for coveted access and exclusive scoops for their books (a journalistic pay-for-play practice decried aptly by one lone
Washington Monthly
blogger as “Communications Corruption”),
⁴
non-brain-washed news consumers sought the truth. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of readers thirsting for unvarnished information about Team Obama,
Culture of Corruption
spent six weeks at Number One on the
New York Times
non-fiction best-seller list.
⁵
The
Times
did its best to ignore the book and other political dissident best-sellers that have dominated their hallowed lists over the past year. No review, of course. Instead,
New York Times
book critic Dwight Garner argued in a piece last summer extolling an obscure biography of Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels that “Karl Marx” was “back in vogue.”

Back on Planet Earth, voters’ remorse spread like necrosis across the body politic. By the end of 2009, pollster Frank Luntz observed, Obama had suffered the “the greatest fall in approval of any elected president since [the Gallup poll] started ongoing tracking during the Eisenhower administration. Obama came into office with the approval of two out of every three voters (67 percent) but ended his first year with just half the electorate (50 percent) offering a positive evaluation of his performance.”
⁶
By mid-April 2010, President Obama’s approval rating had hit an all-time low—dropping to 46 percent.
⁷
Half the Americans polled by Gallup in the spring of 2010 said Obama did not deserve a second term.
⁸
Even Amber Lee Ettinger, the hot, young YouTube star known as “Obama Girl” who famously declared her “crush” on Candidate O, confessed that she had fallen out of love: “He did create some jobs, but most of them were government jobs and that doesn’t really help the middle class.”
⁹

Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts learned the hard way that more Obama would not translate into more public confidence or votes. Demonstrating the curse of the reverse Midas Touch, Obama campaigned in person for Jon Corzine, Creigh Deeds, and Martha Coakley—only to watch them come crashing down respectively in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the Virginia gubernatorial race, and the special election in the Bay State to replace the people’s seat held imperially by the late Teddy Kennedy. Democratic congressional candidates ran for the nearest exit to the tune of The Police hit, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Asked whether he wanted the president campaigning for him in California’s Central Valley, Democrat Congressman Jim Costa told the newspaper: “I’m more popular in my district than the president.”