Posted on 11/12/2008 4:43:14 AM PST by .cnI redruM
People manage to survive in Washington, DC while adding nothing to the commonweal, and sometimes doing substantial damage. They have the dirt on their rivals, they know who’s butt to kiss or they just have a canny instinct that enables them to artfully duck at the right moment. I’m not sure which describes Jamie Gorelick, but like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of a Terminator Movie, it seems you can predict that she’ll be back. This time, perhaps, as President Barack Obama’s new Attorney General.
In revolutionary France, Minister Talleyrand had a similar career to Jamie Gorelick. He worked for the dying Ancien Regime. Then, once the French Revolution culminated in the execution of Louis XVI, Talleyrand nearly faced disaster. Yet, he timed his defection to the revolutionaries with perfection, and conveniently arraigned a prolonged trip to England, on behalf of the Revolutionary government, during the Reign of Terror.
For a time, after English Prime Minister William Pitt expelled him from England, Talleyrand worked as a speculator for an American bank. He made a strong political connection to kindred spirit Aaron Burr, but also managed a simultaneous friendship with Alexander Hamilton.
Even as he worked his way into the good graces of the Directory, which resulted from the initial attempts by the French to reconstruct their state after nearly a decade of revolutionary purges, he cultivated his friendship with General Bonaparte. Quickly, he expanded his influence by assisting Napoleon Bonaparte in his 18 Brumaire coup d’etat.
In the waning days of Napoleonic influence, Talleyrand again joined the winning side. He played a major role in the restoration of Louis XVIII and the Bourbon dynasty. This prompted Napoleon to tell Talleyrand to his face that he was "shit in a silk stocking."
Thus, Talleyrand spent his entire career rising to positions of power and influence and then betraying the public trust. He was disloyal, financially unscrupulous, and morally degenerate. Yet, as Napoleon also bluntly pointed out, “Like garbage, Talleyrand floats to the top of the harbor.”
While I doubt seriously that Jamie Gorelick comes within three standard deviations of Minister Talleyrand’s IQ, her career seems to parallel Talleyrand’s in many respects. She has her fingerprints on several recent events that could be filed in a database labeled “Epic Fail.”
As an eager, young staffer to President Bill Clinton, she served as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 1997. It was during her tenure here in which Jamie Gorelick authored a memo entitled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations.”
This memorandum placed limits on the cooperation between counterintelligence agents and criminal investigators. It may have prevented immigration authorities from barred anti-terror investigators from legally accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained months prior to his intended participation in the 9-11 Hijackings. Concerns over jurisdiction issues prevented the sharing of Moussaoui's data. When Democrats appointed Jamie Gorelick to a chair on the 9-11 Commission, the role her memorandum may or may not have played was taken off the list of viable investigation topics.
This allowed Jamie Gorelick to move on to the next phase of her illustrious career. Despite a complete and total lack of any relevant professional experience in banking, real estate or finance, her next career destination was Fannie Mae. She spent 1997-2003 as a Vice-Chairman of Fannie Mae; helping to make the current American real-estate economy possible. In 2002, she told Business Week Magazine the following about Fannie Mae.
"We believe we are managed safely. We are very pleased that Moody's gave us an A-minus in the area of bank financial strength -- without a reference to the government in any way. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions."
The benediction of Gorelick should have been viewed as the leper-bell of impending disaster. Robert Samuelson describes what people soon learned about Fannie Mae.
If you've paid attention, you know that chief executive Franklin Raines and chief financial officer Timothy Howard left the company after two federal agencies accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses.- Washington Post, 2004
This just describes the initial impact and does nothing to describe how Gorelick and friends went about their systematic pillaging of Fannie Mae’s public credibility. In an entry entitled “Update on First Annual Druyun Award to Jamie Gorelick.”, I described the perquisistes given to Gorelick and other influential officials with Fannie Mae. This bold, unapologetic fraud staggers the mind. The table below turns the stomach of everyone who wants clean and responsive government to be the order of the day.
Wall Street Journal Describes Fannie Mae Enron's Special Loans From CountryFraud
Wall Street Journal mined real estate records for this data |
Some of Gorelick’s other contributions to domestic governance include a memorandum calling for the banning of strong encryption for Internet communication unless the government was given the keys. And of course, her resume wouldn’t have been complete had she not worked to legally defend Duke University against it’s own lacrosse team after that wonderful bonfire of the politically correct.
So now Jamie Gorelick rises again like the Pheonix, from the ashes of her own profoundly ineluctable incompetence. She just hasn’t ruined things enough; so Barack Obama plans to make her Attorney General. I guess she has copied herself after Minister Talleyrand in every aspect except one. Minister Talleyrand was known around world for being extremely good at his job.
ping for later - this is making me sick now. Change we can believe in?
It’ll be the same cast of clowns from the Clinton era reshuffled with some new radical freaks added for good measure.
It’ll resemble the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I am not often rendered completely speechless by a news report, but this one did just that. I just can’t even formulate a response. Good lord.
How about “Let us pray. . .”?
Increasingly, President-elect Obama (my, how difficult that is to type without cringing) appears to be assembling an all-star team of Clintonistas bent on reinstating the course they first charted 15 years ago. Only this time, instead of replicating the disasters that made them famous, they will succeed, being led as they are by a man whose intellect and abilities are unquestioned. And I mean that quite literally: Obama’s faculties have been largely unquestioned by the news media, much less by members of his own party. He is, after all, The One, a presumptive worker of miracles who will lead us out of the House of Bush Bondage into the Land of Milk and Honey (or at least, government-subsidized cheese and sugar-price supports). May Heaven help us.
Obama is my shepard, I shall not want.
He leadeth me to fields of 401Ks that I can plunder.
I'll be dust but I fear for my off spring and their children.
Let's do The Time Warp again, eh?? (see sig line)
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