January 30, 2009
There’s so much change going on in Washington right now that my head is spinning faster than Linda Blair’s at a revival meeting. Former Senator Tom Daschle, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, is under fire for not paying over $140,000 in taxes for free use of a car and driver that was provided by a Democratic fundraiser. This is Obama’s second nominee to brush off his tax obligations in what is becoming a disturbing, if not utterly predictable, pattern.
It seems the tax and spenders can’t be bothered to dig into their own pockets, but they’re ready to stick it to you and me. Obama administration officials called Daschle’s skullduggery “a stupid mistake,” and decided Daschle should not be penalized because he had discovered the tax liability himself and brought it to the attention of the Finance Committee, which is vetting his nomination. Daschle said he realized in June 2008 that he might have a tax problem.
This doesn’t pass the laugh test, even for the odious cesspool that is Washington. Daschle’s “stupid mistake” took place over a period of four years, making them “stupid mistakes”…plural. So this wasn’t any oversight, but rather an ongoing criminal enterprise as they say in the racketeering game. Daschle would have us believe that he spends his free time combing over old tax records just to make sure he’s paying his fair share—how else to explain his sudden discovery that he’d made a “stupid mistake.”
It turns out Daschle is a two-sport athlete. He has spent the last four years doing lobbying work for K Street law firm Alston & Bird, where he received generous remuneration (can you say millions?) from the insurance companies and health care providers he will be charged with policing should he be confirmed. That makes two tax cheats and two lobbyists among Obama’s nominees. And the night is still young.
Daschle has been a long-time confidant of Obama’s, just another one of the Messiah’s “guys on the block”—those close acquaintances that end up being indicted, going to jail, and generally abusing their power, with Obama apparently oblivious to it all. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But fret not, rumor has it Daschle has a deadly hook shot from the low block.