Graft: Chicago Style

:Sean Hannity invited Culture of Corruption author Michelle Malkin on his program yesterday to discuss the latest White House scandal. As reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday:August 18, 2009
Two firms that received $343.3 million to handle advertising for Barack Obama’s White House run last year have profited from his top priority as president by taking on his push for health-care overhaul.
One is AKPD Message and Media, the Chicago-based firm headed by David Axelrod until he left last Dec. 31 to serve as a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod was Obama’s top campaign strategist and is now helping sell the health-care plan.
Complex stuff, but one observer boiled it down nicely:
Man owns firm, man takes government job, man sells firm and firm owes man $2 million (if firm goes bust, man out $2 mil), firm lands multi-million dollar contracts from organizations doing business with the government on a top issue for the person man works for and man is out advocating for.
Malkin and Hannity savored the irony: that the same White House insiders and Democrat operatives eager to smear town hall protesters as “Astroturfers” funded by “big corporations” are themselves funded by… big corporations. Adding insult to irony, these are the very same “big corporations,” Malkin noted, that liberals like Obama and his supporters supposedly believe are so “evil.”
Certainly, as Hannity pointed out, this budding scandal looks like “an obvious conflict of interest” tainted with “the appearance of impropriety.” Should the situation turn out to be as “fishy” as it appears, few could claim to be surprised. David Axelrod is, as Malkin said, a veteran of “Chicago pay for play politics.”
Perhaps the only individuals unaware of Axelrod’s unpleasant reputation are the University of Nebraska-Lincoln organizers who invited him to deliver the “Peter J. Hoagland Integrity in Public Service Lecture” this fall.