MM: D’OH-bama’s Mortgage Mess
Yesterday, after a barrage of questions from McCain bloggers, Countrywide critics and Clinton operatives, ABC News asked Obama about the stunningly obvious hypocrisy. The result was, well, painful.
Struck with an apparent case of restless mouth syndrome, Obama first indignantly rejected the notion that he should pick his veep pickers more carefully: “Well, look, the, the, I mean — first of all I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages.”
Translation: I will remain willfully blind to the conflicts of interest created by my own mortgage industry-bashing rhetoric.
Next, Obama leaned on his “Washington games” crutch and attempted to distance himself from the appointees whom he has assigned the most important and intimate of tasks: “You’re going to have to direct — it becomes sort of a — this is a game that can be played — everybody, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships. I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters.”
“Tangential”? He appointed them to search for his second in command. “Tangential” is the cleaning lady in his Sioux Falls campaign office.
Finally, channeling Bill Clinton’s “is-is” parsing, Obama attempted to argue that his dubious veep selection committee members don’t really “work” for him: “They’re performing that job well. It’s a volunteer, unpaid position. And they’re giving me information, and I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate. So these aren’t folks who are working for me, they’re not people I have assigned to a particular job in a future administration.”
There are only so many gaffes, missteps, mistakes, flubs, and self-delusional statements one can make before serial naivete becomes endemic stupidity. Obama has reached the point of no return.