Webloggin » Barack Obama’s List of Unsavory Relationships Continues to Grow

Barack Obama has tried hard to present himself as a new breed of politician; one that is determined to bring a refreshing change to the American political stage. The Democrats are peddling it, the media is pushing it and the American left is buying it. But Obama’s claim of being different is little more than empty rhetoric. It seems that every week more and more bones land on the floor while the skeletons in his closet are starting to pile up. This monster isn’t pretty.

By far the most alarming aspect of Barack Obama’s campaign is not what he says but who he associates himself with. His growing list of radicals, anti-American characters and scandal laden advisers is nothing short of scandalous itself because of its hypocrisy and the mainstream media’s reluctance and unwillingness to cover it with any sort of scrutiny.

Regardless of the media’s attempts to gloss them over, Barack Obama’s closest friends and advisers are becoming somewhat of a distraction for a candidate that has been in a free fall ever since Reverend Jeremiah Wright God damned Amerikkka.

This list continues to grow while Barack Obama runs for cover under the claim that pointing these relationships out is just a dirty facet of the political “game” (this is known as the “dirty tricks deflection” excuse).

The following list is who we know about so far even though we aren’t one full week into the unofficial general election stage of the campaign:

Recall, we are not supposed to discuss any of this because as Barack Obama says, the actual act of mentioning this in public is just a dirty game of politics.

Despite this obvious attempt to deflect blame we can see that the list of unsavory relationships continues to grow at an exponential rate in terms of hypocrisy and conflicting interests. It is so bad that both ABC and the Washington Post, no friends to Republicans mind you, have been compelled to cover the latest issue in detail.

Last month, Sen. Barack Obama turned to James A. Johnson, a former Fannie Mae chief executive and Washington insider since the Carter administration, to lead the vetting of potential running mates for the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

[~snip]

The questions about Johnson began after the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that he received more than $2 million in home loans that might have been below average market rates from Countrywide Financial, a partner of Fannie Mae and a leading purveyor of the kind of subprime mortgages that spawned a national housing crisis.

As CEO of Fannie Mae, Johnson, a former chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale and chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, was the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie Mae’s earnings were manipulated so that executives could earn larger bonuses. The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the maximum payouts to Fannie Mae’s senior executives — $1.9 million in Johnson’s case — when the company’s performance that year would have otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all, according to reports in 2004 and 2006 by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

In a 2006 civil enforcement action against Fannie Mae, another agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, called the company’s 1998 accounting “fraudulent” and said numbers were “intentionally manipulated to trigger management bonuses.“

As if the Johnson issue isn’t enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth the WaPo report continued with another bad egg on the Obama campaign. This time the person is a Washington insider and lawyer that helped fugitive financier Marc Rich gain a pardon from President Clinton.

But Johnson is not the only member of Obama’s vice presidential vetting committee that Republicans have targeted.

They also are preparing a case against former deputy attorney general Eric Holder for his role in the granting of a pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich in the last days of the Clinton White House.

In December 2000, as Rich’s lawyers were closing in on the pardon, one of them, Jack Quinn, singled out Holder in an e-mail. “The greatest danger lies with the lawyers,” Quinn wrote his co-counsels. “I have worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder will be helpful to us.”

Not bad enough? It continues.

Other prominent Washington supporters of Obama present their own problems. Gregory B. Craig, for example, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, represented Juan Miguel Gonzalez in 2000, as Gonzalez was trying to bring his son Elian back to Cuba. The incident still rankles the Cuban community in Florida, a pivotal state in the presidential election.

Now that he has been caught once again with his hand in the cookie jar of questionable relationships Barack Obama is repeating the pattern of distancing himself after the fact.

Game? You bet. It is one that both the media and Barack Obama will be playing to the bitter end.
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