2008

Coming Soon from Hillary Attack Web Site: The Obama Chronicles

ArchPundit January 15, 2008 1 Comment

Remember the Clinton chronicles and the list of those who mysteriously died with ties to the Clinton and the bullshit right wing smears to claim Vince Foster was murdered. It was essentially a hit job and a particularly bad one by Clinton enemies stemming from the Arkansas Project.

Now if your candidate had undergone that kind of smear, would you unleash it on another Democrat? Apparently those at Hillaryis44.com think it’s fine….

Imagine if another candidate was referenced in a suicide note. The crowd from Chicago would have demanded a special prosecutor by now.

Obama named in a suicide note:

On the day he disappeared, Norman Hsu, the disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, sent letters to friends that recipients viewed as a suicide note, people familiar with the letter have said.

In his letter, Hsu apologized for any embarrassment he had caused recipients of his largesse. In the last four years, he has generated donations of more than $1 million for Democratic politicians across the country.

Hsu’s undoing began two weeks ago with articles raising questions about his fundraising activities in the Wall Street Journal and about a criminal case in his past in The Times. In his letter, said a person familiar with its contents who asked to remain anonymous, Hsu contended that those articles were planted “by a politician who pledged ‘hope and change’ ” — an apparent reference to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“This is a sad and baseless allegation,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. “We had no knowledge of his past criminal behavior, fugitive status or a potential straw-donor scheme until reading it in the newspaper.”

Notice how the L.A. Times calls Hsu a “disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign” downplaying Hsu’s ties to Obama – even as it appears Obama is the one apparently named in the suicide note. Hsu was not called a fundraiser for the Innocence Project, even though he was a fundraiser for them and sent them the suicide note. No Hsu is tied instead to Hillary Clinton.

The rambling bizarre mention of the Innocence Project is the hardest to understand.  The Innocence Project is a stellar organization that includes people on its board like John Grisham and Janet Reno.

So by this standard if Tony Rezko was to attempt suicide, if he mentioned the Clintons, they’d be mysteriously implicated?

Talk about your freak shows. I haven’t seen anything this bizarre outside of Free Republic.

The Real Problem With Bob Johnson:

ArchPundit January 15, 2008 No Comments

Errr…he’s a right wing hack:

Robert L. Johnson came to the Bush administration’s attention when it needed him most. The cause of the White House’s duress was an annoyingly munificent collection of millionaires, headed by Bill Gates Sr., who had banded together to oppose President Bush’s plan to abolish the estate tax. In newspaper ads and press conferences, they held forth on the obligation of the wealthy to give back to society. So effectively did they seize the moral high ground that even the most fervent opponents of the estate tax resigned themselves to it. “$(I$)t is looking increasingly doubtful,” reported The Wall Street Journal a week later, “that large estates will escape federal taxation altogether.”

Evidently this didn’t sit well with Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), whose family stood to gain millions if Bush succeeded. Johnson is not a man with a deep sense of social obligation. Not long ago, when an interviewer prodded him for his views on philanthropy, Johnson scoffed, “$(B$)eing a very wealthy person is not something that I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Gee, I got all this money. How do I give it away?'” There is, however, an important exception to this every-man-for-himself ethos: society’s duty to aid extremely wealthy African Americans. This social obligation Johnson takes very seriously.

So Johnson did what he often does when his interests are at stake: He played the race card. Johnson gathered a collection of black business leaders and demanded an end to the estate tax. Taking out newspaper ads of their own, Johnson’s group attacked the tax for draining wealth from the black community. Unlike “very wealthy white Americans” who supported the tax, he declared, “We as African Americans have come to our wealth on a different path, a different road than they have.” Gates and his friends, Johnson implied, were not really promoting the common good; they were trying to keep the black man down. All of a sudden, it was not so clear who held the moral high ground. Estate tax repeal had become a civil rights issue.

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Fortunately for Johnson, and even more fortunately for his heirs, estate tax repeal subsequently passed into law. But Johnson’s campaign to abolish the estate tax was more than just a way to save a few million bucks. It was the beginning of a political partnership between the CEO of BET and the president of the United States, one that has now turned its attention to an even grander cause: the privatization of Social Security. On May 2, Bush appointed Johnson to his commission charged with transforming the popular program. Once again, Johnson has racialized a long-standing conservative crusade. We must turn Social Security into a system with individual investment accounts, he argues, because the existing program unfairly shortchanges blacks. Social Security overhaul is Bush’s most radical–and most politically perilous–aspiration. That the administration has entrusted Johnson with this task, despite his lack of expertise (and, indeed, his lack of any history of public interest in the issue), is a measure of the ideological reliability with which it now regards him. Johnson, according to one analyst, “is trying to position himself as Bush’s go-to guy in the African American community.” And it looks like he’s succeeding.

One issue that continues to baffle me is that while Obama uses poor language to say Social Security is in crisis-it’s not, it has issues at best, he has a clear plan that is quite progressive to deal with it–a plan that solves the problem beyond any reasonable estimation from the actuaries.

However, Clinton wants to turn over the decision to a pane of villagers in DC–people who think there is a crisis and wanted to buy into Bush’s privatization scheme.  There’s a clearly better answer here–and one more transparent and Hillary Clinton doesn’t have it.