Daschle, Daschle, Daschle...

When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.  

--Matt Taibbi

Okay, so I read this:

USA TODAY:
Daschle delayed telling Obama about tax problem; earned $200K+ from health industry

-and was about to write a screed, and then I read this:

Glenn Greenwald: The Daschles: feeding at the Beltway trough

-and figured, well what's the point?

It's actually funny reading the USA Today coverage, and reading the pre-emtive spin on this guy. Senators talking about how this needs to be "looked at" but how they feel they should "move forward."

Glenn's commentary contains the salacious details of Daschel's typical Washington second marriage - and this bit:

...they know how to stay on the right side of what is strictly legal.  There's no evidence they did anything illegal, but it is still blatantly sleazy and corrupt -- exactly the sort of legalized sleaze and corruption that Barack Obama, as a centerpiece of his campaign, vowed to combat. And it's unlikely to matter for exactly the reason Mencimer said:  there are very few people in Washington who could criticize this sort of behavior without being guilty of the most extreme hypocrisy imaginable. 

Nice. When this guy gets confirmed - we can all look forward to nothing happening on the health care frontier.

Late edit:  I like this bit in the NTY:

Under his consulting arrangement with InterMedia, the report said, Mr. Daschle received $1 million a year, or $83,333 a month. The payment to Mr. Daschle for May 2007 was omitted from the annual statement of income sent to him by InterMedia. Ms. Backus said the omission resulted from “a clerical error by InterMedia.”

Oh, well - that explains it all then. InterMedia paid him $83 K a month and they just forgot to tell him. No wonder he didn't put it on his taxes.

As if the tax error is the biggest sin here: The guy's a total shill for his financial backers. The taxes are just the reason we're talking about it now.

Cripes.