Sunday, July 07, 2013

Darrella Issa's Horny Toad

If you want to know exactly what’s wrong with politicians today and have a high threshold for disgust, skim the bloated “How to Win in Washington” in the New York Times Magazine.

Written by chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich and culled from his insider Beltway book, the piece is an acrobatic feat of journalistic tap-dancing, revealing the sliminess of Darrell Issa’s hatchet man Kurt Bardella while at the same time recounting with a straight face his subject’s illegal behavior (and Leibovich’s own) in violating privacy that makes Eric Snowden look like a Sunday School teacher.

Talk about reading other people’s mail: Self-proclaimed opportunist Bardella copied the reporter, without their knowledge, of e-mail to and from US senators and media people on a regular basis.

Leibovich offers his coziness with Issa’s gnome to support his thesis that “an economic and information boom in recent years has transformed the city...To say that today’s Washington is too partisan and out of touch is to miss a much more important truth--that rather than being hopelessly divided, it is hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has both democratized the political conversation and accentuated Washington’s myopic, self-loving tendencies. And it misses, most of all, how an operator like Kurt Bardella can land in a culture of beautifully busy people and, by trading on all the self-interest and egomania that knows no political affiliation, rewrite the story of his own life.”

The ins and outs, and ups and downs, of Bardella’s symbiosis with Issa has led to his mentor “firing” him over revelations of his ruthless illegality and then re-hiring him as “senior adviser” to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which guess-who is chairman.

Issa has been lying low since he overreached on a Sunday talk show by calling White House spokesman Jay Carney a “paid liar,” but he will be back with new hearings and new Obama smears soon and, right there with him will be his Issa-Uber-Alles henchman, Kurt Bardella.

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