Beach reading for the thoughtful crowd

It’s beach reading because it’s well-written, in plain (often sharp and amusing) language.  It’s for thoughtful people, because it describes the collection of rogues and crooks in Obama’s wake, all desperate for power and your money:

Other People’s Money
By Bookworm

Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
By Michelle Malkin
Regnery Publishing Inc., 2009
289 pp, plus 75 pages of supporting end notes

Those of us paying attention before the election found it difficult to reconcile Barack Obama’s oft repeated promises that he would run a completely transparent, honest, post-partisan administration, one that was not beholden to lobbyists or any other special interest groups, with his actual past practices and associations. A guy whose bestest buddies included his own opportunistic wife, Chicago consigliere Valerie Jarrett, pit bull and money man Rahm Emanuel, unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and the entire Daley political machine didn’t seem likely to abandon that modus operandi just because he switched to a larger venue.

Immediately after Obama’s inauguration, the doom-and-gloom contingent started seeing their worst fears realized. Even the most minimal due diligence revealed that those people he wanted closest to him were bedeviled by histories of tax problems, nepotism, pay-for-play scandals, political bullying and, in one case, garden-variety shoplifting. The organizations he champions are no better.

The problem for the ordinary citizen when it comes to Obama cronies is twofold. First, the main news outlets have been loath to take a hard look at Obama’s friends, colleagues and allies. Each person is lauded as a brilliant choice and it’s only been thanks to dogged work from Republican politicos and conservative bloggers that the rot under each person’s shining carapace was revealed. The organizations are ignored. Second, the myriad failings dogging Barack’s buddies are so voluminous and diverse that it’s very easy to lose track of things or to throw up one’s hands in despair and ignore the whole problem entirely.

Michelle Malkin has taken it upon herself to resolve this twofold problem. In a single, compulsively easy-to-read book, she organizes the various players in the Obama administration: his tax-defective cabinet; his “bitter half,” aka Michelle Obama; his nepotistic Veep; his unusually crooked cabinet; the money men who power this man of the people; the unions; ACORN; and the residual Clinton contingent are all there, in Technicolor greed.

Read the rest here.