Hypocrisy Doesn't Equal Change

Secretary of the Treasury-designate Tim Geithner has a problem.

It seems that not only forgot to pay over $42,000 taxes to an agency he hopes to control as Treasury Secretary, he also hired an undocumented worker.

This of course, was discovered during the official vetting process of the Obama team but didn't come out until yesterday. Covering up or hiding the facts is not change we can believe in and smacks of hypocrisy from a former Senator who passed transparency in government legislation. Shouldn't we hope for transparency of the transition team too?

What smacks of even more hypocrisy is the apparent willingness of Democrat Senators and liberal special interests to forgive. It's understandable the need to fill the Treasury Secretary post - we're in a financial crisis. But there have been plenty of scenarios planned for over at Treasury that I think that we could go a couple of days and maybe even a week so that Geithner could at least answer some questions.

Back in 2001, then Labor Secretary-designate Linda Chavez was crucified by the organized labor and strongly questioned by then-Senate Minority Leader and a current Secretary of HHS-designate Tom Daschle for employing an undocumented worker. The controversy was so much so that Linda Chavez, as you recall she backed out of the confirmation process and never even got a hearing. The kicker is, hiring undocumented workers wasn't even illegal at the time (not that I condone illegals).

At the time, Daschle said:

"The labor secretary ought to set the example to be able to enforce all of the laws. If she hasn't been able to do that in the past, one would have serious questions about whether she'd be able to do it in her capacity as secretary of labor."

Does Tom Daschle's standard still apply? Of course it doesn't.

Today, Senate Democrats are saying things like Geithner just made a mistake.

But there have been plenty of other mistakes made by Republicans that equal to (see Chavez) or lesser than which Democrats and their special interest allies have made plenty of hay about.