More Democrats acting like Democrats

From Front Page Magazine:

News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undisclosed ethics problems.

One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts. It paid Greenberg's firm $239,996 in 2006 and $317,775 in 2008. (Emanuel's own campaign committee has also paid Greenberg more than $50,000 since 2004.)

To be fair, Greenberg had polling contracts with the DCCC before - but each new election cycle brings its own set of consultants. And Emanuel was certainly generous with his roommate.

Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable "hospitality" between colleagues. Hospitality - for five years?

Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000.

Nor is this all that seems to have been missed in the Obama team's vetting process. Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for "failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie "service." Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency's PAC gave his campaign $25,000 - its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That's what friends are for, isn't it?

Now Rahm Emanuel is in the White House helping President Obama dig out of the mess that Freddie Mac helped start.

The president's chief of staff isn't subject to Senate confirmation, but his ethics still matter. Is this the change that we can depend on?

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of the fact that Emanuel crawled out of the same sewer of Illinois Democrat party machine politics as impeached governor Blagojevich and Obama himself. However this is a problem which is common to the entire Democrat party. After all Obama'a Treasury Secretary who refused to pay his income taxes for some years and lied on his returns in other years is not a Chicago native nor or any of the other Obama appointees who have had to withdraw their names because of tax or other ethical problems.

And Bill Clinton, the most corrupt president in US history, was not from Chicago (although the Little Rock/Hot Springs axis in Arkansas gives Cook County a run for its money). No, the reason why this kind of corruption and criminality is the rule in the Democrat party (unlike the Republican party where it exists but is the exception) flows from the mindset of the kind of person who is attracted to the Democrat party.

The average Democrat who seeks political power is, in his own mind, and elite who is better and smarter than the average citizen. Because the Democrat politician views him or herself as an elite they feel that the rules which apply to everyone else should not apply to them. Rank, after all, should have its privileges.

Democrats also tend to reject the authority of traditional religion-based morality. Observe the way in which his fellow Democrats rushed to defend Bill Clinton after he was caught committing adultery in the Oval Office or the way in which Democrats who claim to be Christian or observant Jews nevertheless still defend practices like abortion.

If you deny the authority of God and hold yourself above the laws of man then what exactly is there to restrain you? Nothing but the fear of legal consequences and public relations problems if you are caught.

And how much fear do those things still inspire? After all Bill Clinton committed perjury in federal court and his only "punishment" was having his law license temporarily suspended and a fine which he could pay with bribe money collected from Red Chinese spies. And he left office with a 60% approval rating despite the fact that both the adultery and the Red Chinese spies were common knowledge by that time.

In the bubble inhabited by the left-wing establishment (Democrat politicians, the mainstream media and academics) the judge of a politician's character is not to be found in how he behaves when no one is looking or in how he handles his own money or how he treats those over whom he personally wields power but in the public positions he takes on a shopping list of liberal litmus test issues. Issues such as abortion, the minimum wage and racial preferences.

Again I point to the example of Bill Clinton who was credibly accused of forcibly raping a woman and was still defended by feminists, one of which said that she would gladly suck him off to "thank him for keeping abortion legal" (she did not, however, indicate whether she would swallow).

In a world in which "virtue" is nothing more than publicly upholding a set of political positions then privately anything goes. Nancy Pelosi can support sweat shops in American Samoa, B. Hussein Obama can engage in corrupt land deals with a felonious Chicago developer and spend 20 years in a church whose pastor screams "God Damn America!" from the pulpit and preaches sermons about how the CIA created AIDS to exterminate black people and befriend an unrepentant communist terrorist bomber like Bill Ayers. Bill Clinton can rape and molest women and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal contributions from hostile foreign governments and terror-supporting Arab potentates. Barny Frank can allow his "partner" to run a gay prostitution ring out of his apartment and Ted Kennedy can kill a young woman then attempt to bribe someone else to take the blame for it.

Elected Democrats can do all of this which ranges from disgusting hypocrisy to outright criminality and still be welcome in and be defended by their party because they want to "keep abortion legal". Is there anything so terrible that a Democrat, even one who supports abortion, can be expelled from that party? As a matter of fact there is. Joe Lieberman - supporter of partial birth abortion - was kicked out of the Democrat party for the monstrous crime of taking a principled stand in support of the war against Islamofascism.

So a Democrat will lose the support of his party if he comes out in favor of making war on people who do things like plan and execute the 9/11 attacks, stone homosexuals to death and behead or hang young girls for the "crime" of "allowing" themselves to be raped and thereby bringing shame upon their father and brothers. Provided that the war was begun under the leadership of a Republican president.

Of course a political party which offers unconditional support to any elected official who will simply support a particular legislative agenda and oppose anything supported by Republicans will be attractive not only to left-wing ideologues but to another class of people commonly known as sociopaths.

Which answers the oft asked question of "what the hell's wrong with that damned party anyway?" You fill a political party's leadership with people who are either true-believers who will do anything to further their ideological agenda or are sociopaths willing to do anything to further their personal agenda, neither of which believe that the rules which govern normal mortals apply to them, and you get exactly what you see running Washington today.