Push from White House to support Chicago 2016 Olympic bid has the smell of scandal

With his decision to jet to Copenhagen Thursday evening to speak before the International Olympic Committee in support of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, President Obama’s propensity for ducking decisions and avoiding his constitutionally mandated responsibilities has to be seen now as not merely shameful but downright pathological. Here’s a partial list of burning issues Obama is ignoring in favor of embarking on a peacock mini-tour of lower Scandinavia:

• Iran continues to school the President in Middle Eastern Rules diplomatic fisticuffs while Obama keeps approaching the Islamic republic as though meekly asking for the next dance at high school prom. So far, Kid Chicago survives with scuffed wingtips and a fattened lip, and President Ahmadinejad struts around Tehran with blood on his knuckles and a sly grin across his face.
• Afghanistan’s trend of becoming a bloodier and less defined battleground since Obama’s inauguration continues to worsen. Rising casualties and sagging morale with both the brass and the boots are symptomatic of the lack of any mission that has clear and useful objectives. Because of White House inexperience with military and national security affairs, a very public game of rock-paper-scissors is taking place between Defense Secretary Gates, theater commander General McChrystal, and President Obama. In the meantime, men and women die in the combat zone and the enemies of the United States gather strength.
• Despite cosmetic signs of economic recovery as evidenced by gains in the major stock indices, unemployment is expected to remain high through most of next year. The struggle to get America back to work may even be further complicated by two factors on the near-term horizon. A new tidal wave of foreclosures may be on the way as hundreds of thousands of so-called payment option ARMs begin to explode. Home sales will also begin to decline for both seasonal reasons and due to the evaporation of the federal tax credit for first-time buyers that assisted builders and developers in off-loading inventory. These could be a one-two punch setting off another wave of problems for banks and lending institutions.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be hard on Obama — we’re reminded by his staff every couple of weeks or so that he inherited more problems than any leader in human history. Furthermore, we shouldn’t be upset either when firefighters stop showing up to douse the flames if the stationhouse chili is good enough for a second helping when the alarm bells start ringing.

Initially it may seem as though Obama’s penchant for escapist escapades — going on Letterman, late night burger runs, going on Leno, jetting off to Manhattan for an impromptu date-night with the First Lady, going on Letterman again — is the most reasonable explanation for why his steamer trunks are packed for Thursday’s Copenhagen’s trip to sell a fluffy vanity project like bringing the Olympics to his home town of Chicago. It’s true that during the course of his adult life, Barack Obama has displayed an attitude toward reality and hard work more akin to that of Truman Capote’s flighty dreamer Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, not the elite club of overachievers to which his predecessors belong and to which he presumptively awarded himself membership. But there is more than a Cracker Jack ring motivating our first ‘slacker’ president to return from Europe with the Olympic torch symbolically in hand. A Chicago Olympics in 2016 would go a long way to line the pockets of the sordid group of characters to whom Obama owes his political career.

Even the retirement of political debts did not seem enough to motivate The One to quick action. President Obama tried pulling the presidential equivalent of calling in sick on this job as recently as two weeks ago, in a call to Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley that we assume left POTUS’ phone-side ear singed. It was left to the First Lady to crack the whip. In the days leading up to her own presentation to the Olympic selection committee Wednesday, the First Lady promised reporters that the “gloves are off” and that she would “take no prisoners.” Her intensely pugilistic statements went a long way to solidify her standing as our most unashamedly coarse and combative First Lady. (To the First Lady’s defense, you have to give the girl props for knowing how and when to pick up the bat and get down to business in a way the commander-in-chief does not.)

For any brave soul in the White House press pool who cared to see the strings pulling at Michelle Obama’s overexposed arms it becomes clear that she and her husband and are under immense pressure to repay some of the First Family’s political debts, including those owed to the “Godmother” of Chicago politics and senior adviser to the President, Valerie Jarrett.

There is arguably no one to whom the Obamas owe more than Valerie Jarrett. As described by Michelle Malkin in the bestselling Culture of Corruption, Jarrett and Michelle Obama’s history goes back to pre-Barack days, and her influence as a mentor and adviser to a young female attorney quickly extended to young Michelle’s fiancée when he entered the picture. At the same time as Jarrett was splitting her time running a Punch and Judy show starring Barack and Michelle, and fulfilling her own political ambitions, she was also raking in six figure compensation as the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development and investment firm that was exposed by Binyamin Applebaum of the Boston Globe in June 2008 to be operating a number of slums in the city of Chicago, right under the nose of Ms. Jarrett.

One particularly egregious example of a dangerously dilapited tenement run by The Habitat Company is the Grove Parc Apartments complex, that is conveniently situated in the area proposed as an Olympic site. In one fell swoop, an Obama win in Copenhagen lines the pockets of Jarrett and her developer friends, as well as destroying physical evidence of Jarrett’s true attitudes toward the poor in Chicago. It is also likely that Chicago legal firms will get fat administering the bond offerings that will inevitably be required to finance major construction and infrastructure projects in advance of a large-scale international event. As Michelle Malkin pointed out on her blog Thursday, the likelihood that tax-increment financing involving notoriously slushy public-private partnerships represents another avenue for a reverse wealth transfer from the taxpayers to unscrupulous parties.

Seasoned reporters should be salivating at the Washington Post and the New York Times. Attempting to expose cronyism, nay, collusion, alleged by some to have taken place between former Vice President Dick Cheney and mega-contractor Halliburton was a full-time occupation for some journalists. It seems the days of investigative print journalism are as dead as the promise of a post-racial America.

On the contrary, White House Chief Snake Oil Salesman Robert Gibbs’ insinuation that the trip is important for broader economic reasons than the narrow benefits to Friends of Obama, does not hold enough water to serve as political cover should the media begin to smell rats in the Olympic Village.  Robert Livingstone, the leading expert on the Olympic selection process, was quoted in a CNNMoney.com article Wednesday as saying, “I think a lot of people look at the Olympics, and they try to justify it by how much money it adds to the economy. [But] if you’re in this to make money and improve your economy, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.”

But if you’re in it to pave the way to improving the economic conditions only for a select group of friends and donors, the Olympics begin to look like a very worthwhile enterprise for the Obamas, and it is why the First Couple finally committed to converge on Copenhagen with the delicacy of malnourished pit vipers.

Perhaps if the Obamas and their assortment of cronies had as much to gain financially from winning the war in Afghanistan, or preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapons program, the American people would get the benefit of at least piggybacking on the way to the right destination.

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