When Is a Lobbyist Not a Lobbyist? When he’s up for a job in the Obama administration.

National Review ^ | February 6, 2009 4:00 AM | Andrew C. McCarthy

[fiodora]

In Chicago, Barack Obama’s M.O. was to talk the talk of a reformer and walk the walk of an old-school machine politician. When he got called on it, he did what machine politicians do: He waxed eloquent about his commitment to transparency even as he stonewalled, obfuscated, and lied.

That is how convicted fraudster Tony Rezko was transformed, before our very eyes, from a guy Obama barely knew to a contributor who may have helped Obama’s political campaigns, then to a bundler who’d actually raised more than $250,000 (some five times the amount claimed in Obama’s initial admission), to a developer who won contracts with Obama’s assistance, to a fixer who helped Obama buy a pricey home the future president couldn’t afford on his own—an ethical lapse Obama finally had to acknowledge was “boneheaded.”

Obama began his administration promising the toughest ethical standards ever imposed by any White House—and, on his first day, issued an executive order restricting the familiar practice of filling government jobs with lobbyists that have private interests in how policy is shaped. The president’s directive is self-consciously reflective of candidate Obama’s scathing condemnation of traditional Washington-style insider-dealing.

As National Review’s Byron York has reported, Craig has an extensive history of representing leftist regimes hostile to the United States, which led him to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of one Pedro Miguel González, an alleged terrorist. Since 1992, González has been evading an indictment for murdering a U.S. army sergeant in Panama City.

[Christian4Bush]

Time for Rush to write the sequel to “See I Told You So”...

[tessalu]

George Mitchell was a lobbyist, working for several Arab countries, and then Obama names him as envoy to the Middle East to work against Israel. Some from Israel have said that they will not be talking to George Mitchell. He is there in Israel during election time. What a liar Obama (Barry Soetoro) is. What a liar!