Charter member of the Team Obama Culture of Corruption

During the Christmas break, corruptocrat Sen. Chris Dodd held a press conference hailing the Senate government health care takeover bill. But he couldn’t distract from the stink of his ethics scandals and his mounting unpopularity at home.

A prescient constituent heckled him during the press conference:

“You’re not gonna get re-elected,” the man said.

Today, Dodd will preempt the voters by removing himself from the running. He’s ending his re-election bid. I’d say good riddance, but Dodd will most likely move on to a lucrative lobbying career a la Beltway toe fungus Tom Daschle or perhaps into a position with the administration of Hope and Change.

Corruptocrats never fade away. They just switch seats on the business-as-usual bus.

***

Connecticut’s Democrat AG Richard Blumenthal will announce today that he’s running for Dodd’s seat:

Connecticut’s popular Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said on Wednesday that he intends to run for Christopher Dodd’s seat in the U.S. Senate, boosting the chances of Democrats retaining the seat in November. Blumenthal, 63, told financial news channel CNBC that he will officially announce later on Wednesday his pursuit of fellow Democrat Dodd’s seat. A press conference is slated for 2:30 p.m. EST at state Democratic party headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut. Blumenthal has been Connecticut’s top law enforcement official since 1990, serving five terms in that office, and previously served in the state’s legislature.

You may remember Blumenthal’s special appearance on the Glenn Beck show back in March, where he proffered his legal opinion on why he was taking action against AIG’s executive compensation packages. I blogged it at the time:

Under what law are you going after the AIG bonuses?

Blumenthal hemmed and hawed for a painful six minutes before coming up with this:

“Because they are undeserving of it.”

Remember those six chilling words:

“Because they are undeserving of it.”

After blubbering that the law doesn’t require that AIG pay the bonuses, Blumenthal then sputtered that it was bad public policy.

Blumenthal also explained that while he didn’t have the authority to go after corruptocrat Sen. Chris Dodd because he was a federal official, he did feel it right, just, and necessary as state AG to do something more about federal tax money spent on AIG.

Finally, he muttered something about the State Wage Act, tucked his tail between his legs, and slunk off the set — no doubt to go wield his legal powers against other targets (Congress exempted!) that he has deemed “undeserving” of their pay.

Blumenthal gives new meaning to AIG:

Asshats In Government.

We’ve got enough of those in the Senate already, don’t we?

***

Flashback…

Dodd and Obama: Corrupt birds of a feather

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2009

Everything you need to know about false Hope and Change can be found in one picture: The image of President Obama embracing embattled Sen. Chris Dodd.

The embattled Democrat is in deep doo-doo over his Countrywide sweetheart home loan deals, corporate bailout cash, and crony associations. New revelations by Countrywide whistle-blower Robert Feinberg confirm what more and more of Sen. Dodd’s constituents in Connecticut are coming to realize: He’s a lying crapweasel. Dodd denied knowledge of the special treatment the sub-prime mortgage company had given him and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad on home loans. (Dodd’s were worth more than $800,000). Feinberg flatly contradicted him in secret testimony on the Hill this week.

Connecticut voters are not smiling about Dodd’s hypocritical bashing of lobbyists on the airwaves while he parties with them behind closed doors. And as they scrimp through the recession, they haven’t forgotten about Dodd’s dozy Irish cottage deal with convicted insider trader Edward Downe, Jr. (who received a Clinton pardon with Dodd’s generous help). Sandra Harris, an unaffiliated voter from West Hartford, told the Hartford Courant: “I’ve lost respect for him…It’s time for a change.” A Quinnipiac poll now shows that 60 percent of key independent voters disapprove of Dodd.

But Dodd’s cratering numbers and mounting ethics scandal aren’t just about Dodd. Damaged birds of a feather flock together. Even before these latest disclosures, Dodd’s approval ratings had dropped to their lowest levels ever. Yet, President Obama – agent of the “new politics,” erstwhile Breath of Fresh Air, guarantor of all that is good and clean in Washington — declared his support for Dodd’s 2010 re-election campaign bid.

“I can’t say it any clearer: I will be helping Chris Dodd because he deserves the help,” President Obama announced in April. “He just has an extraordinary record of accomplishment, and I think the people of Connecticut will come to recognize that.”

Obama progressives should cringe at their president’s bear hug of one of the most ethically-compromised politicians on Capitol Hill. The Beltway swamp is teeming with Democratic corruption scandals (Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha’s earmark factory and tax-subsidized airports and radars to nowhere; New York representative Charlie Rangel’s rent-controlled apartment scams and tax scandals; California representative Maxine Waters’s business ties to a minority-owned bank that received $12 million in TARP money under smelly circumstances, for starters). But Dodd’s career epitomizes the most fetid aspects of Washington’s culture of corruption. It’s a textbook case of nepotism, self-dealing, back-scratching, corporate lobbying, government favors, and entrenched incumbency.

When he launched his presidential bid in February 2007, Barack Obama inspired millions and rallied the world with his pledge to “build a more hopeful America.” He told a cheering crowd in Springfield, Illinois, land of Lincoln, that he recognized “that there is a certain presumptuousness in this, a certain audacity to this announcement. I know that I have not spent a long time learning the ways of Washington, but I have been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington have to change.”

Two years later, Barack Obama declared his support for an entrenched U.S. Senator drowning in the decrepit old politics of pay-for-play.

Two years later, at an “historic and “unprecedented” record pace, Barack Obama presided over a heap of botched nominations, crony appointments, lobbyist paybacks, union and left-wing activist payoffs, and abandoned promises to make government more transparent and accountable to ordinary Americans.

ORDER IT NOW

“Washington is broken,” Obama lamented on the campaign trail. Yet, under President Obama, the business of Washington is booming. The collapse of the Era of HopeNChangeyness demonstrates the first and last law of political physics: As government grows, corruption flows. Massive new federal spending plus tens of thousands of pages of new regulations plus unprecedented new powers over taxpayers and the economy ensure limitless new opportunities for sleaze, favor-trading, deal-cutting, and influence-peddling.

The president’s dwindling blind faithful may still cling to the belief that he can work miracles. But no one, not even Barack Obama, can drain a swamp by flooding it.

Michelle Malkin is author of the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery).