SmallGovTimes.com

By: Lance Thompson | Published on 03/31/08    

During the 2006 campaign, no Democrat could grant a print, radio or television interview of more than a dozen words unless it contained the phrase "culture of corruption." Capitalizing on Republican congressional scandals like the outrageous graft of Duke Cunningham and the overblown scandal of Mark Foley, Democrats filtered every news event through the "culture of corruption" spin. They promised to "end the culture of corruption" if only the voters would elect them. The Democrats rode the mantra to majorities in both houses.

Strangely, just two years later, the phrase "culture of corruption" has fallen into the same frequency of use as whale oil and buggy whips. This would be a sign of progress if Democrats had indeed eradicated corruption as they promised. Instead, they have taken over the corruption franchise and expanded it exponentially. Democrats don’t dare mention "culture of corruption" lest the same platform that swept them into office should sweep them out again.

Still, the electorate cannot help but notice the compulsion to corruption the Democrats have recently demonstrated. The most glaring, of course, is the downfall of self-proclaimed champion of justice Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general and then governor who used his offices and government agencies to bully political opponents as often as he prosecuted wrong-doers. When it came to light that he was just as likely to patronize the same sort of prostitution rings he was famous for prosecuting, he resigned in disgrace.

He was replaced by his lieutenant governor, David Paterson, who immediately confessed to a previous extramarital affair during his first week in office. Later, both he and his current wife admitted to having affairs during their marriage. Then, Paterson admitted he may have used campaign funds to pay for hotels in which he conducted such affairs, a violation of state election laws. Paterson, a Democrat, is the current governor of New York.

Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has always had a reputation for prevarication, but recently she’s been working overtime to burnish it. The current example is her complete fabrication of landing under fire during a trip to Bosnia while she was first lady. It turns out that the harrowing landing in a combat zone which she recounted on two occasions was complete fiction. Mrs. Clinton explained that she "misspoke," but there is no known instance of her landing under fire at any time, so she could not have confused the incident with some other. She could only have confused the truth with untruth, a chronic condition for Mrs. Clinton.

Another recent development is that Senator Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, was on the board of directors of Delta Financial, one of the bankrupt sub-prime lenders that Mrs. Clinton has blamed for the credit crunch, falling home values, and their disproportionate impact on low-income families. Mrs. Clinton has consistently laid the blame for the sub-prime meltdown at the feet of the Bush administration, but she need only have looked as far as her own staff.

Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama has been mired in the controversy of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for the last couple of weeks. Pastor Wright used his pulpit at the Trinity United church to convince his flock that black people will never get a fair shake from the United States, that our government introduced the AIDS virus to destroy the black population, to equate the wartime bombing of Hiroshima with the Spetember 11th attacks, and to justify Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel. Senator Obama is a friend of the pastor, attended Trinity United for twenty years, had his wedding ceremony performed by the pastor, had his children baptized in the church, and included the pastor on his campaign as a spiritual advisor. When the statements of the pastor came to the attention of the general public, Obama at first claimed he had never heard them, then that he had never heard them personally, then that he disagreed with them, then that he disavowed them. Each position was proven to be wholly or partially untrue. Obama is a long time member of a church that preaches racial division, anti-Americanism, and pro-terrorist sentiments. If he were truly unaware of the nature of the church he attended for twenty years and the views of his friend the pastor, it is unlikely he has the perception and situational awareness required of the President of the United States.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was able to get "culture of corruption" into almost every sentence she uttered during the 2006 campaign, began her tenure by endorsing Congressman Jack Murtha for House majority leader, despite nagging accusations of his trading federal spending for campaign contributions dating back to the FBI’s 1980 Abscam bribery investigation. (The Abscam investigation was initiated by the Carter administration, with Democrat majorities in the house and Senate, so it could never be characterized as a partisan case.) Regarding her endorsement of Murtha, Melanie Sloan, executive director of the Democrat-supportive group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said, "Pelosi’s endorsement suggests to me she was interested in the culture of corruption only as a campaign issue and has no real interest in true reform."

During the 2006 campaign, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean also steadily beat the "culture of corruption" drum, castigating Republicans who wrote letters on behalf of Indian tribes represented by lobbyist Jack Abramoff. When asked by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (29 January 2006) if any Democrats had acted in a similar fashion, Dean replied, "That’s a big problem. And those Democrats would be in trouble. And they should be in trouble." But in 2005, Senator Harry Reid, now Senate majority leader, accepted several thousand dollars from the Coushatta Indian tribe, an Abramoff client, and subsequently interceded at the Department of the Interior on the tribe’s behalf in a casino dispute with a rival tribe. Between 2001 and 2004, Harry Reid received a total of $66,000 in Abramoff-related donations, not counting the Coushatta money.

So the party that ran on cleaning up the "culture of corruption" has in fact immersed itself in that very culture. Current Democratic congressional leadership (Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) as well as the two Democrats competing for the party’s presidential nomination (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), and the New York state house (Spitzer and Paterson) are all tainted with corruption, and are hardly in a position to clean up after themselves. That will be the responsibility of voters in November.

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