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are just asking for derision. These people were SPECIFICALLY supposed to be "new" and above this kind of thing, but they're precisely the opposite.
A multimillionaire who's been at the eye of the storm of the financial shenanigans also can't seem to join the party and pony up his fair share to society just reeks of privilege, greed and a cavalier self-absorption.
Someone who's supposed to be the oracle of honor and decency, literally the commissar of honesty, just isn't quite up to snuff.
Then there's Daschle. For an administration bathing itself in the homilies of newness and change, one could hardly find more of an apparatchik hack; Tip O'Neill's dead. Sure, he's got a good heart, but he's soiled with the taint of lobbying and medicine for money, and that just reeks. The fact that he couldn't cop to this earlier is pathetic, and the way it was done was almost as lame as Gore only contesting four counties in Florida: by "going all the way" and offering to pay much more than he really owed, it just makes him look like an out-of-touch and bloated pol. Not paying OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TAXES makes him sound like the worst kind of greedy Leona Helmsley; most people will NEVER make over a hundred grand a year, so they see this as an abuse of the extremely wealthy. I feel sorry for him; he's not that rich. Then there's the fact that he's the embodiment of stodgy, entrenched political power, even though he was deliberately rooted out by the hell-bent reactionaries awhile back.
Yes, the media is still skewed to the right, but these three were literal red meat: they were guilty of things that were supposed to be their strong suits. Geithner was supposed to be a financial wizard, but he can't even do his taxes, so he's either incompetent, dishonest, or both. Killifer was supposed to be the Queen of squeaky-cleanliness itself; so much for that: she didn't even want to fully disclose her malfeasance. Daschle was supposed to be a seasoned veteran of the ins and outs of bureaucracy, but he either can't keep track of which troughs he's gorging himself at, or is slippery enough to try to skate.
To a certain degree, the media operates on a fairly pure principle: a story is a story. These three are each stories, but together, they're easy to portray as systematic. The sneering reactionaries are just looking for something to latch onto, and they LOVE to besmirch the ethics of a group who came into town proclaiming their ethical beauty.
Obama handled it well by saying that he screwed up, and hopefully they'll all learn something from this, but the driving dynamic here is more human nature than evil reactionary bias. If Republicans had done this, we'd have harangued, sneered and lampooned to such a degree that it would make Maddow and Olberman seem non-derisive.
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