Free Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies by Michelle Malkin

INTRODUCTION
    ALL HAIL THE ACHIEVATRONS!
    P hew. Janitors in newsrooms across America worked overtime in the halcyon days after Barack Obama won the presidency.
    It wasn’t easy cleaning the drool off laptops and floors in the offices of journalists covering the Greatest Transition in World History.
    New York Times columnist David Brooks laid claim to the most soaked keyboard and stained carpet in the business. He praised Team Obama’s “open-minded individuals” and “admired professionals.” He raved about their “postpartisan rhetoric” and “practical creativity.” And—ooooh-la-la!—how about the brains of all those brainy brainiacs? So smokin’ hot:
This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy—rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.
Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life—that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line. 1
    It had only been seventeen days since Election Day. But the president-elect (complete with his own “Office of the President-Elect” logo) and his team of valedictocrats (armed with their Ivy League degrees) had already bowled Brooks over with their organizational prowess:
And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition....
Most of all, they are picking Washington insiders. Or to be more precise, they are picking the best of the Washington insiders.
As a result, the team he has announced so far is more impressive than any other in recent memory....
. . . Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.
    And Brooks’s employer has profited mightily from the hype. Celebrating Obama’s 100-day mark, New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee exulted that the financially troubled Fishwrap of Record had sold $2 million worth of Obama-themed merchandise. 2 The Times has a vested financial interest in propping up the Obama administration.
    At ABC News, former Democrat operative-turned-objective newsman George Stephanopoulos also exhibited the symptoms of the Obama transition’s salivary gland stimulus. “We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes,” Stephanopoulos dribbled. 3 After blotting his chin a bit, he added: “[H]e’s managed his transition with the same kind of precision and discipline that he managed to show during the campaign. . . . It’s hard to imagine this transition going much better for the president-elect.” 4
    The Washington Post and Newsweek both indulged in Transition-mania, launching websites featuring by-the-minute blogging of Barack Obama’s “historic” and “unprecedented” ascension to power. The New York Times told the story of how the savvy Obama made a phone call