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

thirteen days before the election to send a feeler out to General James Jones for the national security adviser post. 5 Thirteen whole days! As if no other incoming president over the last 232 years had come up with the genius concept of reaching out to potential nominees before inauguration day.
    This used to be called planning ahead.
    In the most “historic” and “unprecedented” incoming administration in our lifetimes, Obama’s phone call was hailed as a visionary advance mobilization for the benefit of Western civilization.
    An inconvenient aside: For all the hype about the Greatest Transition in World History, Obama failed to beat the pace of the Reagan White House. By Day 100, Obama had 65 officials confirmed. Reagan had 73—and the Evil Republicans did it without all the bungles and baggage that the Angels of Obama brought with them. 6 “Obama’s a faster turtle, but he’s still a turtle,” transition analyst Paul Light observed—his voice of reason drowned out amid the media frenzy. 7
    Journalists and cable TV talking heads chattered endlessly about Obama’s “record speed” on the one hand and his “exhaustive” vetting process on the other. Application forms ran on for 7 pages and 63 questions, the New York Times marveled. 8 (The Bush-Cheney vice presidential application form was 200 pages. But when Republicans require rigorous background checks, it’s not “exhaustive,” it’s a paranoid invasion of privacy. But I digress.)
    President-elect Obama next dispatched hundreds of meticulous “agency review team” members—“135 people divided into 10 groups, along with a list of other advisers”—into the bowels of the federal government. Their mission: To “rigorously examine programs and policies” and expedite the transfer of power. 9 The transition team leaders wore smart yellow badges on the job with “Yes, We Can”-do attitudes to match.
    Awestruck Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts of ABC News echoed the conventional wisdom: “Some would say it’s a team of rivals, à la President Lincoln, or is a better comparison a team of geniuses as FDR did?” 10
    I wrote this book to give you the exhaustive answer that President Obama’s gyrating media harem doesn’t want you to read.

    “Crony,” William Safire tells us, comes from seventeenth-century college slang at Cambridge University in England. The word is rooted in the Greek khronios (“long-lasting”) from khronos (“time”). Safire traced its etymological evolution in the United States:
. . . [C]rony took on a pejorative connotation as the sinister side of “friend”—more of a hanger-on, the recipient of favors for old times’ sake. In 1946, when President Harry Truman’s poker-playing friends brought disrepute on his Administration, the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock wrote that “New Dealers and Conservatives found themselves together in opposition to what a press gallery wit has called a ‘government by crony.’” 11
    Obama’s team—the “best of the Washington insiders,” as David Brooks called it—is a dysfunctional and dangerous conglomerate of business-as-usual cronies. They play basketball with the president now instead of poker, but they are every bit as disreputable and demanding as their 1940s counterparts. The administration is teeming with long-lasting favor-seekers in government, business, and the lucrative bridge in between. The corruption stretches from wealthy power brokers Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, to pay-to-play-tainted Michelle Obama and Joe Biden, to ethically challenged, bailout-bungling money men Larry Summers and Tim Geithner at Treasury, crime-coddling corporate lawyer Eric Holder at DOJ, to the crooked Service Employees International Union, the shakedown artists at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the ever-expanding swamp of Washington lobbyists.
    This book pulls together the familiar and not-so-familiar pieces of the transition in