Let's Apply Harry Reid's 'Dog Catcher' Standard to Barack Obama

The mainstream media has been repeating--without any criticism,
context, or opposing view--Sen. Harry Reid's claim that Mitt Romney
could not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in the Cabinet--or even to serve as "dog catcher"--because
he has only released his most recent tax returns, not his entire tax
history. The story currently leads major news websites, including
National Public Radio's hourly news update. So it seems appropriate to
do what the media will not: apply Reid's "dog catcher" standard to
Barack Obama.

Let us first take the question of whether Barack Obama would have
been confirmed by the Senate for any position, Cabinet or otherwise. If
his lack of experience was not a sufficient obstacle, his past history
of serious drug use--which is even worse than the admissions in his
memoir, Dreams from My Father--would have barred his
nomination. So, too, would his radical past, including his associations
with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Derrick Bell, and a
host of extremists with whom he made common cause.

On the tax issue, it is worth reminding Sen. Reid (and the media)
that several of President Obama's nominees for the Cabinet did, in fact,
have very serious tax problems--and were confirmed anyway (though at
least one, with a sense of humility lacking in her colleagues,
withdrew). The most notorious is "TurboTax" Tim Geithner, who
outrageously blamed a computer program for his failure to pay
self-employment taxes while he was working for the International
Monetary Fund. He was confirmed anyway, under considerable pressure from
the mainstream media (and after an inexcusable capitulation by Senate
Republicans), which painted Geithner as the only person who could
possibly be qualified to run the U.S. Treasury in crisis.

It is also worth noting that Sen. Reid's best hope for maintaining
his job is to see Elizabeth Warren unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown in
Massachusetts. But Warren's candidacy is only possible because she
could not receive confirmation from the U.S. Senate for the leadership
of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to which Obama desperately
wanted to appoint her--not just because Republicans oppose the agency's
powers, but because of her own radicalism. Now that she has been
revealed to have lied, apparently about her Native American heritage,
there is no possible way she could be confirmed for a Cabinet position,
or any other requiring the approval of Congress. Yet Reid and Obama are
counting on her.

So the "dog catcher" standard that Sen. Harry Reid has sought to
apply to Romney--and which he has, with the mainstream media's help, succeeded in
applying to Romney--would have prevented Obama and his own nominees
from taking office. But the media has not applied Reid's standard to
Obama, because the media almost always applies a double standard to
Democrats and Republicans--especially so with Barack Obama. (Update: And would a man who confessed to eating dog meat be made dog catcher? I think not.)

To take only one of hundreds of examples of that double standard, in
the 2000 campaign, Republican Sen. John McCain released thousands of
pages of his medical records; he did so again (albeit only for a few
hours) in 2008. But then-Senator Obama released a single page--the equivalent of an elementary school "doctor's note"--and the media meekly accepted his release gratefully.

Case closed--and a man who had never held any position of serious
responsibility in the public or private sector--neither dog catcher nor
anything else--went on to win.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/07/13/Lets-Apply...