The Democratic Disgrace by Daniel Greenfield

Every job has a minimum requirement. The absolute very least that anyone can do without being considered a complete and utter failure.

The minimum requirement for a Commander-in-Chief is to stick around when an American diplomatic mission is under fire. Obama flunked even this minimal requirement by going to sleep and then flying off for a fundraiser in Vegas.

The minimum requirement for a Secretary of State is to at least pretend to care why such an attack took place. Hillary Clinton failed that minimum requirement by declaring that it didn’t matter why the attack happened.

The minimum requirement for a Vice President is to avoid becoming a national embarrassment. Biden has failed miserably at that.

The minimum requirement for the country’s leading environmentalist is to refrain from selling a television news network created to promote an environmental message to one of the world’s leading petro-tyrannies. And Al Gore failed there.

Obama, Clinton, Biden and Gore couldn’t even meet the lowest possible standard for their positions, but that’s not a problem in a Democratic Party that no longer has any standards.

America’s newest Secretary of State, John Kerry, was wrong about every historical development since he became involved in politics. If there was a matter of international politics that Kerry got involved in, he was bound to come in on the wrong side.

Kerry picked the Viet Cong over America and picked the Sandinistas over the Contras. He shoveled billions of dollars in foreign aid into Pakistan while it was giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and claimed that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, a sponsor of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, was “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.”

Senator John Kerry had vouched for the sincerity and credibility of everyone from Madame Binh to Daniel Ortega to Mohammed Morsi and for a career record somewhere between stupidity and treason; he was rewarded by being put in charge of implementing the foreign policy of the United States. But then again, Hillary Clinton had received that same job for losing to Barack Obama in the primaries.

While the Bush Administration had appointed qualified men and women to head up the country’s diplomatic efforts, Obama appointed senators who had tried and failed to become president as some sort of bizarre consolation prize.

Kerry joins a Cabinet full of washed-up and scandal-prone figures like Attorney General Eric Holder, whose career should have ended after his role in the Clinton Administration’s Marc Rich pardon scandal, and Arne Duncan, who was rewarded for his failure to reform Chicago schools with the highest education job in the country.  Then there’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius who violated the Hatch Act by campaigning at a government event.

Eric Holder bears the distinction of being blasted by Congress in two separate sets of hearings a decade apart. In the waning days of the Clinton Administration, Deputy Attorney General Holder lusted so badly for the Attorney General’s job that he was instrumental in covering up the pardon of Marc Rich.  The House Government Reform Committee called Holder’s conduct “unconscionable”.

A decade later, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held Attorney General Holder in contempt for his cover-up of the Fast and Furious gun-running operation that led to hundreds of deaths. That made Holder the first sitting cabinet member to be held in criminal contempt of Congress and in another administration that might have led to his dismissal. During the Bush Administration, cabinet members had resigned for much less, but the Democrats had given up even maintaining the pretense of being a law-abiding party.

There is hardly anything that a Democrat can do wrong that will force him to resign, barring the combination of severe mental breakdowns and outrageous criminality, as in the cases of Congressman David Wu and Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.  Racist jokes, like those made by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden about Indian convenience store owners, go virtually unnoticed, as do bizarre remarks indicative of mental illness or a frightening degree of ignorance.

Congressman Hank Johnson used a House Armed Services Committee hearing to ask an admiral whether Guam might tip over if too many Marines land there. Congresswoman Shirley Jackson Lee delivered a speech on how well North Vietnam and South Vietnam were getting along. Johnson followed that up by calling for a new constitutional amendment to control free speech and Jackson did her part by accusing the Tea Party of being the new KKK and demanding that black people’s names be represented in the naming scheme for hurricanes.

And Johnson and Jackson were not even the worst members of the Congressional Black Caucus. That particular honor belongs to Congressman Alcee Hastings who bears the unique distinction of being one of only eight Federal officials in American history to be impeached and removed from office. But that hardly slowed down Hastings who ran for Congress and has been sitting there for twenty years and racking up even more scandals.

Hastings however faces stiff competition from Congresswoman Maxine Waters who was chosen to be the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee despite helping her husband’s bank obtain millions in bailout money. But Waters still lags behind Barney Frank, the former ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, whose reward for letting his home be used as a brothel was being given oversight over the nation’s financial services industry.

Ethics investigations have become routine and toothless. The Democratic Party has accepted corruption as the new normal. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, it hardly even bothers putting on a show of outrage when its corruption is brought out into the light.

The Democratic Party has become comfortable in its disgrace. It no longer even bothers to deny the charges; instead like Obama or Clinton it shrugs off each charge and asks what difference does it make?

Hillary Clinton’s question at the Benghazi hearing gets right to the root of the problem with the Democratic Party. For her, what happened at Benghazi made no difference because she knew that she could not and would not be held accountable for it. That arrogant attitude has been the public face of the Obama Administration in response to every scandal.

The threats of Congressional investigations have become impotent in the face of a Government-Media complex blocking reporting on the latest scandal and leaving the Democratic Party free to be as corrupt as it wants to be.