Scandal in the White House?

Vice President Joe Biden is in a bit of hot water. It seems that he has used his position to enrich a friend of his, Peter W. Galbraith. Galbraith who is the son of renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars. The Washington Examiner puts it this way - "It seems that Galbraith used his political influence to get rich off Iraqi oil money."

The article then marvels at the great lengths that the New York Times goes in order to distance this from the Vice President.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

The Times needs to read its own paper. Of course Joe Biden advocated this view. He wrote about it in this May 2006 article printed in the New York Times! Or how about this Times article written by Galbraith himself admitting that Biden advocated a plan that enriched Galbraith. The key part is this paragraph.

IN a surge of realism, the Senate has voted 75-23 to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up and cannot be put back together. The measure, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, supports a plan for Iraq to become a loose confederation of three regions — a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni enclave in the center — with the national government in Baghdad having few powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil revenues.

Does anyone believe that if this had happened when President Bush was in office that Dick Cheney would have had the New York Times making excuses for them? Would they have accepted the word of "aides to both politicians" as the final word?

The Washington Examiner concludes its story with the following paragraph.

What happened here is clear -- Joe Biden advocated policies in Iraq that his adviser Galbraith also advocated. Galbraith profited handsomely off those policies through close ties to oil companies. Does anyone think that if this story were about an adviser to Dick Cheney profiteering as a nexus between powerful politicians and oil companies that the paper would dishonestly obscure the relationship between the two men?

Would anyone want to bet that this story never becomes a scandal, that the mainstream press virtually ignores it? The odds are in favor of this being swept under the rug. This is as blatant a display of partisan, dishonest media corruption that I have ever seen in this country.

Hat tip to Instapundit.