http://www.nationalreview.com/node/347437/print
“Which leaves us with Mr. Watt, a political creature who would seem odd if he were not so familiar: the race-baiting left-winger funded by Wall Street. Mr. Watt’s top financial benefactor is Bank of America, a firm recently sued by FHFA. (If it has occurred to anybody at the White House that this presents a conflict of interest, they have said nothing about it.) In 2009, about half of Mr. Watt’s campaign funds came from banking and real estate. The usual suspects are well represented: Goldman Sachs, the Credit Union National Association, Wells Fargo, the National Association of Realtors — all make appearances on his top-donors list.”
President Obama keeps telling the country who he is, and the country, to its continuing discredit, refuses to listen. The latest entry in the personnel-is-policy file comes in the form of Mel Watt, an irresponsible racist from the Democratic Socialists of America caucus, whom the president wishes to put in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. On the record of his public pronouncements alone, Mr. Watt is unfit to hold any federal office; given that the FHFA has oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the corrupt government corporations at the center of the 2008 financial crisis, this nomination is particularly worrisome.
One must admit to a certain grudging respect for Barack Obama’s handling of questions stemming from his association with impenitent racists such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and old-school socialists such as Van Jones. In 2008, Obama was taking a beating in the primaries over his association with the Reverend Wright, the divine who lamented that “them Jews ain’t gonna let him talk to me” after the nation evinced some discomfort with his racist “Black Liberation Theology,” his blaming 9/11 on American “chickens coming home to roost,” his Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, and his “God damn America!” chants, and who today spends his time worrying about the effects of “white racist DNA.” Ankled by his association with this paranoid racist ranter, Obama responded by lecturing the country at large on racism, a move roughly equivalent to Mark Sanford’s giving a sermon on the seemliest means for exiting a marriage. But the country, or at least enough of the country, was willing to be snookered by Barack Obama.
President Obama continued to offer more of the same, and now serves up a heaping helping of race-obsessed political opportunism in the form of Mr. Watt’s nomination. Mr. Watt, a member of the House representing North Carolina, in 2005 angrily declared that a majority of white voters would never vote for a black candidate, so sick is our country with the plague of racism. Barack Obama was shortly thereafter elected. We suppose he almost had a point — in 2008, Barack Obama in fact did not receive a majority of white votes, which no Democrat has since the party’s shift to the hard left in the 1960s. But Barack Obama was more popular with white voters than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, a fact that does not square with Mr. Watt’s libel on the American people.
