Where Do We Get Such Losers?
When delivered by Ronald Reagan, the question “Where do we get such men?” used to be the ultimate contemplation about the people who make this country great. Not anymore.
Today, when we look at the delusion and deceit surrounding at least five Democrat members of the U.S. Senate, the question now becomes “Is this the best we have?” Let’s look at a few.
When Cory Booker moved to Newark, New Jersey, he had it all: multiple degrees from Stanford, a Rhodes scholarship, a winning smile and a willingness to lie his keister off about a central feature of his earlier campaigns.
He also had an imaginary friend, T-Bone -- a drug-dealing, streetwise guardian angel of Cory Booker -- as he tried to convince the people of Newark he was not just a little rich kid, he was one of them, bursting with street cred.
Booker trotted out the T-Bone stories at every early campaign stop in his races for mayor: T-Bone told him this, T-Bone told him that. And of course, as brilliant as T-Bone was, he was still on many occasions the recipient of Cory Booker’s sage counsel.
But T-Bone was never there.
The Star Ledger and National Review broke this story of delusion almost at the same time. An excerpt from Booker’s home town paper:
When he was first elected mayor of Newark, the tale of T-Bone was a staple of Cory Booker’s speeches.
"I said hello to this guy and I’ll never forget he leaped off the steps where he was standing and looked at me and threatened my life," Booker said during a 2007 speech at the New School in New York.
"I later got to know this guy and his name was T-Bone and I’m a vegetarian so that was a particularly vicious threat," Booker said to big laughs.
Months later, The Star-Ledger tried to find T-Bone, to no avail. Those who knew Booker then said the character was a fabrication.
Fabrication? When did the media get so delicate about their accusations of deceit?
Jimmy Stewart chased a big white rabbit around and they wanted to put him in a padded cell. Cory Booker does way worse, way more often, and the people of New Jersey beg for more. Maybe they belong in the padded cells.
Let’s stay in New Jersey: over the last six years, Senator Bob Menendez has gone through two criminal trials and an ethics investigation. During all these legal proceedings, there was very little disagreement about the facts: Menendez received hundreds of dollars in gifts and favors from Dr. Salomon Melgen -- a doctor who is now sitting in the hoosegow for 17 years for Medicare fraud.
These gifts include sexual tourism trips to Central America, where Menendez later used his office to try and get his concubines into the United States as residents.
The list of sordid activities is long and not in dispute: But Menendez successfully convinced enough people that he was just doing favors for a friend, and vice versa. Thus, it was within the bounds of the law.
Enough people (and jurors) bought it that he is up for re-election in a few months. From imaginary drug dealing thugs to real-life hookers on an unlimited expense account, all we know for sure is that it’s good to be a king in New Jersey.
Up the freeway in Massachusetts, the now infamous Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren found herself with a tenured position at Harvard Law school after spending the better part of an adult lifetime telling people she was a native-born Native American.
And if you don’t believe her, just check her cheekbones.
But she took it to another level, submitting recipes for an American Indian cookbook -- which she plagiarized -- and she stood by while Harvard bragged about her Native American birthright. The first on the faculty of Harvard Law.
None of that is true. In fact, some say that if Warren’s ancestors were on the Trail of Tears, it was as a guard or a captor. Not an Indian. At this point, what difference does it make?
In Connecticut, when Senator Richard Blumenthal first ran for the Senate, he was fond of telling stories about his time as a combat soldier in Vietnam. He had lots of stories, full of details, especially how veterans were abused when they came home.
“As it turned out, Mr. Blumenthal never served in Vietnam,” said the New York Times. And that is all there is to say about the Stolen Valor of Senator Blumenthal.
News of the latest and strangest case of pure Democrat malfeasance in the U.S. Senate came earlier this month, when it was revealed that a driver and office worker for Senator Dianne Feinstein was actually an employee of the Chinese State Security Services. A spy.
Curiously, the FBI allowed the spy to retire five years ago after they could find no evidence he turned over any actionable intelligence to the Chinese.
Anyone who has spent any time with any member of Congress (as I did for several years with my father-in-law who was a member of Congress) knows how much you learn by just hanging around. There were lots of phone calls to cabinet officials, lobbyists, other members of congress, you name it.
I knew who was in, who was out, for starters.
Recently we learned he was more than a driver, more than an office boy. He was a full-fledged, ‘whisper in her ear at the right time’ staffer for a major member of the U.S. Senate.
Feinstein knew all the secrets. But apparently, she did not know of the hundreds of ways a person can give away a secret, without ever even knowing. Frowns, eyebrows, smiles, limo companions, friends, enemies.
And let’s not forget the easy access this spy had to her hometown office after hours.
I don’t know where we get creatures with such a dubious acquaintance with reality. But even more importantly, I cannot imagine why we keep them around.
There are tons more examples that I don’t have the time to find: the story of Teddy Kennedy’s adventures at Chappaquiddick is on pay per view and I have to get back to that.
Colin Flaherty is the author of that scintillating best seller Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, which CNN says is very naughty book for telling the truth about black violence and how it is wildly out of proportion.