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Anthony Grant

Something’s rotten in the District of Columbia

I didn’t vote for either of the Bushes. The foreign policy of George Bush fils in particular represented such a colossal failure of both cunning and creativity that I don’t even know what to say about it, and not just because so much has already been said.

As stupid as things got under Bush, you have to wonder when, if ever, the elevator ride to basement-level that IQs are on at the White House is going to stop.

First, you have the unspeakable tragedy, or rather tragedies, in Colorado last Friday. I commend the President for his remarks in the wake of the mass shooting. But who could not be deeply disappointed by the abject presidential failure to do anything substantive about the epidemic of gun violence in America? He has time for fundraisers, energy to feather his fragile nest and stamina for a nice speech, but that’s it? That’s his vision of America, the audacity of his hope? The hopelessness of inaction is more like it.

But there’s been more in recent days that could make you throw up from Washington, city of so many nauseous surprises. Banksters from the now permanently scarred and dis-respectable HSBC testified before a Senate committee about money laundering for an assortment of global pussycats including Iran, Hezbollah and the obligatory bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartels. Sweet! Coiffure-challenged bank prez Irene Dorner said HSBC “did not live up to expectations” – ah? – and their head of “compliance” resigned, doubtless, in keeping with the twisted spirit of the times, with a healthy severance package.

What a bunch of base creeps. The DOJ is conducting a criminal investigation and more power to them. But all the big banks need greater scrutiny and this one in particular should be shut down, its lazy, self-serving “compliance” officers and ranks of corporate drones forced to do community service in the form of maintenance work for the UN Disengagement Observer Force along the Israel-Syrian border.

That is, after they tear down those ridiculous HSBC adverts visually polluting airbridges at too many airports to mention.

And hot air-bridging the gap between the ridiculous and the rotten we have none other than Jane Napolitano, perhaps the single most uninspiring public official of our time, a woman next to whom Calvin Coolidge looks like Rudolf Valentino.

By now it’s been widely reported how Islamic Group member Hani Nour Eldin, from Egypt, was welcomed to the White House this week. The Islamic Group, unlike HSBC, has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Dept. of State.

Napolitano was in fine apologist form at a congressional hearing: “As we move forward, we are going to continue to have visitors to this country that the State Department and others feel are useful to bring to the country, to have discussions moving forward, who say they’re members of a political party that in the past has been so designated [as a terrorist organization.”

An apologist for pathetic foreign policymaking who at the same time was careful not to apologize for breaches of protocol: this individual, who made sure to ask for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman, now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for allegedly plotting to blow up lots of things in “the homeland,” got velvet-glove treatment at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave without, apparently, Congress even knowing.

That’s bad. Kudos to Peter King, the Republican Congressman from New York and Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, for grilling Ms. Janet on the matter.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t resolve it. Beyond the indignity of making a VIP out of someone with demonstrably nefarious “political” affiliations, this points to a President with a warped sense of foreign policy priorities, one with the wrong agenda, or both.

In the meantime his opponent Mitt Romney goes on about England. I never expect much to come out of a swamp except for noxious odors, but come on D.C., rise up from the rotten, or at least do a better job of pretending to.