July, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 7: Prostitutes In The State Department, EPA's Hidden Man Caves, Ambassdorships For Sale, And More

This is the seventh in a series that reviews the monthly insanity from the American political class. It is truly unbelievable that we need so much time to chronicle the insanity, lunacy, wasteful spending, and other idiocy that the American politicians can wrought every month. And of course, they do so much bad stuff they never get around to resolving the truly major issues of our times, issues that threaten and hinder most Americans.

So let’s see if we can finish up the insanity today…but no promises:

1) Although most Presidential administrations do it, the Obama administration has taken it to unheard of heights. What is it? The awarding of ambassadorships not based on experience and not based on time spent in the State Department and not based on intelligence but based solely on how much money a person has raised for President Obama’s political campaigns or how much a person has helped Obama‘s political activities and accomplishments.

This latest insult to good government was reported by a June 28, 2013 article in the Washington Examiner. Patrick Gaspard, who is the current executive director of the Democratic National Committee, was a former political director for the Obama administration. He has been nominated to be the new ambassador to South Africa.

Gaspard had previously come under scrutiny for being connected to ACORN, the community organizing group that was accused of providing advice to undercover activists about running a prostitution ring. Thus, it appears that Gaspard has no State Department or diplomatic experience, he is simply a Democratic Party political operative.

But it gets more insane. Kirk Wagar isn’t even a political operative. He is a disability insurance attorney in Miami. His qualifications to be a U.S. ambassador: he helped raise $500,000 for Obama's re-election campaign in 2012. He has been nominated by Obama to be the ambassador to Singapore.

Alexa Wesner is the founder of an organization that helps investment groups to participate in Get Out the Vote efforts in Texas. She has been nominated as the American ambassador to Austria. And what a coincidence, she also helped raise $500,000 for Obama's re-election by hosting a $38,500 a plate dinner in 2011.

Isn’t it good to know that our international standing as a nation is not represented by professional, experienced diplomats but by people with no international training, experience, or smarts? Insanity.

2) Short sighted and ignorant gun control advocates constantly want to pass new laws in an impossible journey to document gun possession of everyone in the world. They somehow think that the Federal government would be a good approach to keeping track of guns in this country.

However, that assumption recently took a hit if you understand what a recent Federal Inspector General analysis and report found out. According to the report, hundreds of shotguns, pistols, rifles and machine guns have mysteriously disappeared from United States Park Police (USPP) Federal police weapons lockers and the government has no idea how it happened or who made the theft happen.

Again, this is the same Federal government, operated by the Obama administration, that has lobbied to restrict responsible gun owners’ Second Amendment rights, has been so inept that it could not even keep an accurate inventory of weapons assigned to less than eight hundred Federal police officers.

The Interior Department’s Inspector General (IG) report summed up this incompetence quite nicely when it stated these government folks have zero understanding of “Basic tenets of property management and supervisory oversight” for “firearms management.”

But it gets worse, according to extracts directly from the report:

1. Our review revealed that USPP had no proper accounting for hundreds of weapons. We discovered hundreds of handguns, rifles, and shotguns not accounted for on the official USPP inventory.
2. We also found that individuals appointed to oversee the program, including senior command officers, gave only minimal supervision to officers and other program staff who had access to unassigned weapons.
3. We found credible evidence of conditions that would allow for theft and misuse of firearms, and the ability to conceal the fact if weapons were missing.
4. Commanders, up to and including the Chief of Police, have a lackadaisical attitude toward firearms management.

Seems like the government has some explaining do before it says law abiding Americans need to have their guns tracked and documented, given the government cannot keep track of its own weapons.

3) Going back to the State Department, CBS News reported on June 13, 2013 that it had received documents from the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), an internal government watchdog entity, that implicate the State Department in a series of global misconduct incidents:

• The DDS investigation cited eight specific examples of gross misconduct.
• One incident alleges that a State Department security official in Lebanon “engaged in sexual assaults” with foreign nationals hired as embassy guards.
• But the indecent behavior was not restricted to low level State Department employees since an ambassador was suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park. The DDS investigation found that the ambassador was permitted to return to his post despite having, “routinely ditched…his protective security detail” in order to “solicit sexual favors from prostitutes.”
• Another alleged incident charged that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries.” The investigation found that this type of problem was “endemic.”
• Aurelia Fedenisn, Former State Department internal investigator, is quoted by CBS: “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”

Three very disgusting things about this scandal. First, it is just plain embarrassing to the country to have its foreign based employees misbehaving like this around the world. Second, more abuse of taxpayer dollars since we are paying for the prostitution and other misbehavior, either directly or indirectly.

Third, and this might be the most troubling, the State Department tried to cover up the misbehavior and to some degree intimidate the whistle blowers who uncovered the acts of prostitution and such. According to CBS, many times DDS agents and investigators were directly told to back off their investigation of misconduct by State Department employees. To the credit of DDS, they publicly exposed the cover ups in their report: “Hindering such cases calls into question the integrity of the investigative process, can result in counterintelligence vulnerabilities and can allow criminal behavior to continue.”

Prostitutes in Lebanon, previously covered lavish GSA and IRS conferences around the country, the Secret Service prostitute scandal when President Obama visited South America, some/many Federal employees are living the high life off of our tax dollars.

4) But wait! Seems we have not covered all of the Federal employee misbehavior from the past month yet. In a June 7, 2013 NY Daily News article, and other mainstream news sources such as Huffington Post, the EPA confessed to finding a “man cave” hidden in a Maryland EPA facility.

What is a “man cave?” Well, in the EPA organization, according to the Daily News, “a huge man cave [was] apparently built with taxpayer money in its main headquarters warehouse outside Washington, D.C. — complete with exercise equipment that could rival a gym's, big-screen televisions, couches, microwaves, refrigerators, pin-up photos, magazines and books, an official EPA report states. The Landover, Md., warehouse workers, who are employed by a private contractor, hid their recreation room oasis from security cameras by screens, partitions and piled up boxes.”

More disgusting waste of taxpayer wealth. But this abuse of government property was only half the issue. When the facility was inspected, if was determined that warehouse's record keeping was both incomplete and inaccurate. The warehouse was filled with EPA/taxpayer inventory that had gone neglected for years and is now mostly unusable.

Included in the lost, wasted assets were untouched refrigerators from 2007 and unopened computers from 2005. Thus, we have Federal contract employees, paid by the taxpayer, lounging about in their home made man cave and fitness center and not doing their assigned jobs, wasting taxpayer assets. Unbelievable.

That’s enough for today. I apologize for not getting through this month’s political class insanity in SEVEN posts, we will try and finish up tomorrow. But don’t blame me, blame those in Washington and State Department posts around the world for the mess that this government is in and the mess it has wrought on the country.

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