A double standard on the scandal beat?
You know, I was beginning to think that perhaps I was being a bit too hard on Michelle Malkin, whom I have always roundly condemned as a village idiot. Then she goes ahead and validates all the mean, nasty things I've said about her ridiculously shallow, poorly thought-out, inept opinionizing.
Her latest effort to let me down easy was this column about Barbara Bullock, the (apparently) spectacularly corrupt President of the Washington (DC) Teacher's Union. This intro seemed innocent enough:
I recently read a nauseating FBI affidavit filed last month in support of search and seizure warrants for three teachers' union officials in Washington, D.C. The accused villains under federal investigation are former Washington Teachers Union President Barbara Bullock, her aide, Gwen Hemphill, and her treasurer, James Baxter. All three are prominent cronies of D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and key players in the local Democratic machine.
The union extracts nearly $700 a month per teacher from its 5,500-member group. The Trump-spending trio and several others are suspected of embezzling more than $2 million in member dues dating back to 1995. Here is just one excerpt of the FBI affidavit detailing Bullock's selfless expenditures:
"Among (her) purchases were: a $20,000 mink coat, along with other mink coats that ... have been stored at Miller Furs in Chevy Chase, Md.; nearly $500,000 in custom-made clothing from a Baltimore clothing maker known as Van Style ... more than $9,000 at retailer Bloomingdales; more than $9,000 for clothing and accessories from a Florida vendor known as Body Scentre Limited; more than $11,000 in purchases from a retailer known as Friedman's Shoes in Atlanta; more than $5,000 to Galt Brothers Jewelry in Washington, D.C.; more than $5,000 to Graffiti AudioVideo for electronic equipment; more than $12,000 at retailer Hecht Company; more than $3,000 at the Hermes Boutique in Vienna, Virginia ... "
She proceeds to go into nauseating detail about the financial atrocities committed by Ms. Bullock, and they are indeed substantial. I was almost beginning to believe that Malkin would come up with a cute little bow to tie all of this together into a neat little package of personal moral bankruptcy. WRONG. What I came across was this:
This is a sickening and all-too-familiar case of education corruption involving the looting of compulsory union dues. Rank-and-file teachers have fought across the country for the right to stop union tyrants from siphoning money from their paychecks for political lobbying and personal aggrandizement. Big Labor's accounting system is a sham. But you won't read about this scandal on the editorial pages of The New York Times.
After all, the looters did it "for the children," right?
Oh, please; spare us the self-righteous moral indignation. This is no more a case of education corruption than Enron was a case of Ken Lay using Grandma's savings to shop at Victoria's Secret. This is a case of a morally bankrupt, financially irresponsible deviant who cared for little but her own material comfort, and was willing to sacrifice the money of those who entrusted her with it. That she is an educator is true, but that fact cannot reasonably be held out as a reason for her actions. To use this case to indict an entire educational system is just totally off the wall, but typical for Malkin. I don't know why I even bother....
