December 23rd 2008
Show Us Your Stuff, Caroline
C
aroline Kennedy wants to be senator, but she doesn’t want to be bothered with disclosure. We are left to assume that financial disclosure, to quote another famous New York doyenne, is for the little people.
According to today’s rather scathing NY Times article, Kennedy refused the paper’s request for even the most basic disclosure, including companies she has a stake in and whether she has ever been charged with a crime.
Not deigning to speak to reporters herself, Her Worshipfulness’ spokesminion said Kennedy would not disclose that kind of information “unless and until” she becomes a senator.
In other words, New Yorkers are being asked to accept a nicely lipsticked pig in a poke. Presumably, Kennedy would disclose the information in mid-May when the Senate ethics rules (oxymoron, anyone?) require financial disclosure forms to be filed.
NY Gov. David Patterson has said she would have to file the same info with him any cabinet-level appointee must file. Of course, that system of disclosure allowed Patterson to appoint a guy who hadn’t paid any taxes in several years. Some system.
Other contenders for the job all have previous government experience and therefore have filed financial disclosure forms. Kennedy, with Obama-like boldness, is trying to convert her lack of experiences into a plus, precluding her need to tell us about her financial background.
The simple matter of fact here is that Kennedy appears to fear disclosure more than she craves the senatorial position. Unless she’s psychotic, her fear has a rational base; it is there for a reason. And if that’s so, then the people have a right to know what’s in Kennedy’s background that she doesn’t want released prior to her appointment to the Senate.
So we are supposed to take her without knowing her. Victor Davis Hansen says that’s exactly the point:
Caroline Kennedy is no doubt a fine individual who by all accounts has led an exemplary life. But her proposed appointment to the US Senate is a rare reflection of ourselves—the glittering of the aristocracy in the left’s vision of an otherwise egalitarian America, the notion that blue-chip certification conveys status and wisdom rather than proven excellence through the life-school of hard knocks, and the ethical bankruptcy of the media that has no principled notion of disinterested inquiry, but now serves as an fawning appendage of the Left.
In short, appointing Caroline Kennedy to the Senate from New York tells us a lot more about ourselves than it does even her.
Art: Tennyson Hayes via Michelle Malkin
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