Nice Work, If You Can Get It

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel "earned" approximately $400,000 for attending six meetings of the Fannie Mae Board of Directors, to which he was appointed by Bill Clinton in 2000. I note without comment that at that rate Emanuel pocketed $66,666 per meeting. While Emanuel was "working" at Fannie Mae, the effectively-a-government-entity was committing accounting fraud in order to justify huge bonuses to its executives (sound familiar?), in a scheme that was actually presented to the Board at one of those Number-Of-The-Beast-payoff meetings.

Fannie Mae was long the Democratic Party's favorite sinecure for loyal party hacks, a place where said hacks could get rich at no-work jobs and then repay their elected patrons with vast swaths of campaign donations. Nice work, if you could get it. While Emanuel was a piker compared to other Clinton-era apparatchiks (Franklin Raines collected something north of $90 million in bonuses thanks in no small part to cooked books, an amount that makes the AIG bonus babies look like street vendors), the question remains: why isn't this a huge story?

Ah, never mind, you know why. There are no enemies on the Left, and there are absolutely no crooks filling their own pockets while they burn down the entire economy. No sirree.