UnNews:Obama off the hook: acted "properly" in Sestak-gate

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

2 June 2010

Mr. Sestak obviously didn't make the claim to harm a President of his own party. But let us be the judge of newsworthiness.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The nation breathed a sigh of relief as President Obama categorically declared that he "did nothing improper" in Sestak-gate.

The emerging scandal concerns a claim that the White House offered Pennsylvanian Joe Sestak a job if he would decline to run against Senator Arlen Specter. Specter switched to the Democratic Party, realizing that no Republican would ever vote for him, and Sestak was the Democrat in line for the seat. Specter has just shown in a primary election that no Democrat will ever vote for him either. The claim came from Sestak himself, during the campaign, and was not picked up by anyone--until now.

It's illegal to offer hack jobs to politicians until after they lose. Thus dozens of Republicans, thrown out of Congress for claiming the sky would fall unless propped up with a TARP and mile-high pillars of banknotes, are now plotting their comebacks in windowless offices, ostensibly working to ensure that the same loot is "spent wisely" and "returned to the taxpayer at a profit."

White House spokesman Barry Gibb, laughing in his unmistakable soprano, had offered various facts to refute the charges:

• The job, on a Presidential advisory board, didn't pay any salary.
• It was one a Congressman such as he could not legally hold.
• And the job offer was made by Bill Clinton, who as President took the concept of honesty in office to new extremes. And he couldn't remember saying any such thing.

It was a chain of excuses more airtight than any since the brouhaha over Mr. Obama's birthplace, and the networks and UnNews raced to cover for the President and make the scandal go away, a knack at which they and we had fallen out of practice in the last eight years.

Mr. Obama sought to put the matter to rest late last Friday. "Let me make this perfectly clear," said the President, going back all the way to Founding Father Richard Nixon. "I did nothing...improper." The statement was rushed out in hopes of being heard by perhaps a few Washingtonians speeding away from the city for a long weekend in the Poconos or Tennessee.

Beyond "improper," did the President do anything illegal? Well, as he scolded John McCain during the White House health care summit, "The American people don't care about these process issues."

Sources

• Philip Elliott "WH had Clinton try to ease Sestak out of Pa. race" Associated Press, June 2, 2010