Failing to do Due Diligence

Due Diligence is a Wall Street term. It means that you check out the goods before you buy. You check the books, you check the inventory, you check the people, you check the business plan, you check the customers and the suppliers; in other words you check out everything to make sure you are not being sold a pipe dream or being scammed.

But some people want to be scammed. Don’t get me wrong, no one – including especially the guys on Wall Street – wants to be scammed. But everyone loves a good story and often the desire to own part of the dream overcomes the fact that that’s all it is: a dream, a figment of the imagination. Think “solar and wind power as alternatives to fossil fuels,” think “Communism is the best economic system but it hasn’t really been tried yet,” think “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Mark Steyn remarks on Obama’s “America’s soft” comment and says, maybe yes: at least that part of the America that elected Obama.

Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.

Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as an archetypal exemplar of the "American business community" rather than as an especially well-connected crony.

Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still underreported Solyndra "green jobs" scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It's hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader.

But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the "Fast and Furious" investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels.

It is alleged that the administration chose to facilitate the sale of American weapons to crime kingpins south of the border in order to support a case for gun control north of the border. Evidence keeps piling up:

The other day, a letter emerged from ATF supervisor David Voth authorizing Special Agent John Dodson to buy Draco pistols to sell directly to known criminals. Over 200 Mexicans are believed to have been killed by "Fast and Furious" weapons — that is to say, they were killed by a U.S. government program.

Doesn't the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Doesn't Newsweek or CBS News? Isn't Obamaism with a body-count sufficiently eye-catching even for the U.S. press? Or, three years in, are the enablers of Obama still so cynical that they accept it as a necessary price to pay for "change you can believe in"? You can't make a hopenchange omelette without breaking a couple hundred Mexican eggs?

Obama says America has "gotten a little soft." But there's nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flat-line jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, "green jobs" multibillion-dollar squandering and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, "centrist" government is hard and cruel. Only the coverage is soft-focus.