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Another prince of political darkness

Apr 7th, 2008 by Taylor Armerding

Interesting – now that Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, has been forced to resign, at least from the strategist gig, we’re finally hearing from the mainstream press what we should have been hearing long ago.
Penn was pushed out for one specific conflict of interest – he met with representatives of the Columbian government to help promote a free trade agreement that Mrs. Clinton, opposes.
But that doesn’t begin to tell the conflict story. Even left-leaning National Public Radio described Penn this morning as a “walking, talking conflict of interest.” Gee, you think if he’d been advising John McCain for months and months, we’d just be hearing the details of all this now?
Turns out Penn, as CEO of Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, an international communications and lobbying firm, is associated with various causes and corporations that would cause most true-believer Democrats to turn as purple as Bill Clinton regularly does now on the campaign trail. They range from Blackwater to Phillip Morris to Union Carbide and various anti-union efforts.
The explanation for all this is that Penn didn’t work “directly” for those clients. Ah, yes. Democrats were happy to accept that line of reasoning when President Bush said he had nothing directly to do with the firing of various U.S. Attorneys, weren’t they.
Also interesting – when Karl Rove went to work for George W. Bush, he was required to give up his other clients. Yet it is Rove, not Penn, who still gets tarred as the prince of political darkness.
Meanwhile, Hillary still thinks she’s the victim of lousy press coverage. Sounds like the only thing good enough for her is a free pass on everything.

Posted in Presidential race, Taylor Armerding | View Comments

  • http://deleted michael cook

    Mr. Armerding,
    I have never, even back in the 1990′s, been a fan of the Clintons.
    But, please, stop with the hyprbole over the Mark Penn flap.
    Penn’s a scumball, as I believe Hillary Clinton is.
    Penn and his firm have been paid nearly ten million dollars by the Hillary campaign for their advice and wisdom.
    Penn and his firm have also been paid a very handsome sum by the Colombian government to advocate before Congress for a trade agreement Hillary Clinton says she opposes.
    It’s all BS, just like the war in Iraq.
    Hillary is a hypocrite just like the neo-con Bushies.
    What all this is is an indictment of this country’s political class; in Central America we refer to that class as the “oligarchy”.
    In time, similar conflicts of interest will come to light about McCain and Obama.
    To me, it all just says modern day political campaigns are little more than tawdry, hypocritical, execises on the part of those who pursue great power.

  • http://monkeesfan.blogspot.com Mike Daly

    Mr. Cook, what it actually says is the Left wants it both ways – it wants to attack its enemies and endorse its friends FOR DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

    “It’s all BS like the war in Iraq.” The war in Iraq is about defeating Islamo-Arab imperialism after it had spent four-plus decades waging war against the US. That’s not BS, your opinion of it is.

  • http://deleted michael cook

    Mr. Daly,
    Iraq was not an “Islamo-Arab” imperialist power that waged a four decades long war against America.

    In fact, in the early and mid 1980′s when the Reagan/Bush administration viewed Saddam Hussein as its ally in the fight against Iran, we provided Saddam Saddam with the helicopters and technology he later used to gas the Kurds in northern Iraq.

    Mr. Daly, before you make such sweeping statements about both history and America’s foreign policy, you might want to do something as basic as checking the facts.

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