Not another one

Former Senate Majority Leader and current Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Tom "You don't professionalize until you Federalize" Daschle is frantically amending his tax returns for the last several years to include as income the car and driver he received from his cushy job as a "consultant" (At $1 million a year. Nice work if you can get it) for Intermedia Advisors, a private equity firm. You know, the evil Wall Street type of business that President Obama accuses of getting the country into the financial mess we currently find ourselves in, and the very industry that he has been vowing to bring to heel in short order.

Mr. Daschle apparently missed the "good old days" when he had a free car and driver provided by peasants such as you and me, and wished to keep the high times going after he lost his Senate seat to John Thune in 2004. Unfortunately for him, such benefits provided to private citizens are considered taxable income, which any competent CPA would have told him had he bothered to give up that nugget of information at tax time over the past few years.

Daschle is quickly coughing up the tidy sum of $101,943 in an attempt to smooth this little conundrum over before the vote on his confirmation. As in the Timothy Geithner mess, any other common peasant would be slowly roasted alive by the IRS for such "forgetfulness". These guys? They just issue mea culpas, and the show goes on.

Republican Congressman Eric Cantor points out squarely in the article just why these liberal Democrats don't mind raising taxes on everything and everyone in sight, without regard to their own financial situations:

"'It's easy for the other side to sit here and advocate higher taxes because -- you know what? -- they don't pay them.'"

Ouch. The truth, it sure does hurt.

The hypocrisy of the media's covering of these appointees' outrageous financial problems is quite telling. As one unnamed (for good reason) GOP insider is quoted saying on Politico,

"If a Bush appointee got rich off of Wall Street in this climate, had a chauffeur from one of his fat cat cronies, had unpaid taxes that amounted to more than what most people make in a year, and then the administration tried to fix it behind closed doors. Democrats would call for his head and would demand ‘accountability'"

And the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be running screaming headline editorials making just those points and others, of course. Now? Dead silence, except to carry the water for these individuals because "they're the only people in the country smart enough to fix our problems".

But not their own. How ironic.

For someone who is promising to "fight for the little guy", President Obama sure is recruiting an awful lot of the very sort of person that he's vowing to go after and punish, isn't he?