{"id":739,"date":"2012-05-30T23:13:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T23:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=739"},"modified":"2013-04-17T18:45:29","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T18:45:29","slug":"secretaries-gone-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/secretaries-gone-wild\/","title":{"rendered":"Secretaries Gone Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n

NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had some unusual cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell, and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch.<\/p>\n

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich \u2014 the top 1 percent, which already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent \u2014 to pay more for what he calls \u201cthe privilege of being an American.\u201d Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children\u2019s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction.<\/p>\n

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the near-impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the United States on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them to just about 2 percent of available offshore lands and 6 percent of onshore. Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are being found on private lands despite, not because of, the Interior Department. When he was a US senator, Salazar claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not change his mind about voting to increase\u00a0offshore drilling<\/a>. And although he controls the leases of the richest oil and gas reserves in the Western world, he recently shrugged that no one knew whether gas would hit $9 a gallon.<\/p>\n

Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green\u00a0companies<\/a>\u00a0like Solyndra, First Solar, and Solar Trust of America \u2014 the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted US gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently, Chu wanted to force a decrease in fossil-fuel burning \u2014 although he later confessed that he does not drive a car.<\/p>\n

Chu also once warned that California\u2019s Central Valley\u00a0agriculture<\/a>\u00a0might disappear owing to global warming. True, it could decline, but that would more likely be due to the Obama administration\u2019s decision to divert irrigation water in hopes of helping out the three-inch San Francisco Delta smelt. Chu should realize that private-sector California farmers create thousands of jobs, while his own cabinet\u2019s Solyndra-like projects have done precisely the opposite.<\/p>\n

Attorney General Eric Holder dropped charges against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. That may explain why he said nothing when the same group put out a dead-or-alive bounty poster on George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. Holder\u2019s department is suing the state of Arizona for passing a law to enforce the largely unenforced federal immigration law. Holder suggested that the Arizona law was racially inspired even as he admitted that he had never read it. Holder has praised the race-baiting Al Sharpton for his \u201cpartnership\u201d and called the country \u201ccowards\u201d for not holding a national conversation on race on his terms. The attorney general has referred to African-Americans as \u201cmy people,\u201d and he has characterized congressional oversight of his office\u2019s failure to rein in the Fast and Furious scandal as racially motivated attacks on himself.<\/p>\n

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis just tried \u2014 and failed \u2014 to draft a proposal prohibiting kids under 18 from working \u201cin the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials,\u201d even on family farms. And she wanted to turn over some farm-training programs now run by the Future Farmers of America and 4-H to the government. Most Americans raised on a farm believe that the times spent doing chores with their parents, siblings, and neighbors were the most important and rewarding years of their lives.<\/p>\n

Yet more worrisome, Solis is selective in her enforcement. She envisions new rules for\u00a0businesses<\/a>, but she first should have ensured that her family had followed old ones. When Solis was nominated, it was learned that her husband had several tax liens against his business, some of them 16 years old. And not long ago, Solis\u2019s department posted a video advising illegal aliens to call her office if they felt they were treated unfairly by employers. Abusing workers is wrong, but then so is entering and residing in the United States illegally \u2014 as a cabinet official should know.<\/p>\n

The common theme with these cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry \u2014 and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner We\u2019ve had some unusual cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell, and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[49],"tags":[322,12,1014,42,77,321,251,291,268,213,1042,320,219,1052,67],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-bV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/cabinets-gone-wild\/","url_meta":{"origin":739,"position":0},"title":"Cabinets Gone Wild","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We've had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3312,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/make-the-rich-pay\/","url_meta":{"origin":739,"position":1},"title":"Make the Rich Pay!","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Last week, President Obama reversed course once again and now wants to raise taxes on the \"rich\" making above $250,000 per year. 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Big new spending. Big new government. This seems to be the proposed cure for the Wall Street-inspired recession. The government now runs major banks and companies, and plans to take control of the American health-care system. And it aims to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2009"","block_context":{"text":"July 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/july-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6553,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-late-great-middle-class\/","url_meta":{"origin":739,"position":4},"title":"The Late, Great Middle Class","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 26, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"It's never been harder to find a decent job making something real. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low. Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. 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