Rep. Darrell Issa, who as head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will be the Republican Party's Chief Inquisitor, didn't wait for an actual investigation before calling President Barack Obama "one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times."
When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus, that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect," Issa said on CNN's "State of the Union."
This isn't a factual statement based on any actual examples of corruption on the part of the Obama administration. It's a statement of ideological belief by a conservative who believes that redistribution of taxpayer money inevitably leads to corruption. That's certainly true sometimes, but what's remarkable about this administration is how little evidence of that we've seen so far. Issa's statement is emblematic of many of the conservative leaders of this generation, who mistake ideological convictions for empirical facts. Armed with the former, they feel no need to actually seek the latter before coming to conclusions.
Issa's problem now is that, having already proclaimed that the Obama administration is corrupt without any actual evidence, he undermines the already flimsy premise that his job is anything other than to find a big scandal the GOP can use to make the president look bad.
