By James Donahue

It seems only yesterday when Americans wept for the sheer joy of being able to elect and see a new and promising president move into the White House . . . one who promised an end to the slime and corruption that has been tainting the glitter of our nation for a good many years.

President Barack Obama came into office on a good many promises, and from all we can tell, he fully intended to keep them. But there has been no honeymoon for this president. Mr. Obama hit the deck on the run, and began moving fast to get his policies put in place. And he has been blindsided by the crooks that remain so deeply entrenched in Washington it looks like we may need to bring our armed forces home from overseas to root them out.

Notice how efforts by Obama to appoint wise, experienced and honest people to his cabinet have been constantly squelched by revelations that top, highly-paid and influential people like Senator Tom Daschle, who would have headed the Department of Health and Human Services, Nancy Killefer, nominated as a government performance officer, and Gov. Bill Richardson, considered for secretary of commerce, didn’t pay their taxes or, in Richardson’s case, was under investigation in a pay-to-play scam.

We can’t overlook Timothy Geithner, who won the appointment as Obama’s Treasury Secretary, in spite of a discovery that he also had an issue with the Internal Revenue Service. It seems that America’s high rollers either are not paying their taxes, or they are as confused as the rest of us about just how to interpret the complex tax laws.

Frank Rick, in commentary this week for the New York Times, noted that in his effort to find qualified “experts” to help him solve the economic meltdown, Obama chose “too many major players . . . who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.”

And this, noted Rich, has placed saboteurs within the team that Obama is depending on to find a way out of the crisis. For example, Rick wrote that Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic advisor, formerly teamed up with Gary Gensler, assigned to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Phil Gramm to block regulation of the derivative markets, a decision that brought down the banking system.

While Gramm is out of the picture, Summers and Gensler are not. And Rich said Bloomberg has reported that Summers is already “freezing” new economic policies offered by Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve chairman and Obama’s appointment to head his Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Thus we have a gang of cut-throats and financial saboteurs still actively wheeling and dealing behind the scenes in the new Obama Administration while the surviving “new-Hoover Republicans in Congress” are playing every trick in the book to wreck, alter, and block passage of the Obama stimulus bill. As Rich observed, these members of the old guard “think government can put Americans back to work with corporate tax cuts but without any spending.”

Actually, we wouldn’t go so far as to give these thugs the credit of just suffering from incorrect thinking. It is obvious that they know very well what they are doing, and we suspect they all are being paid very well by big business interests to do it. That many Democrats in both the House and Senate are wavering on the bill makes us think the big money is beginning to slip into their pockets now as well.

Has anyone wondered, for example, why there has been little effort by our legislators or the Justice Department to investigate blatant criminal activities by former President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and members of his cabinet? They not only violated Constitutional freedoms with their illegal wire-tap operations, exposing America’s top spies and refusing to answer Congressional subpoenas to testify on a list of other possible issues, but they ordered the torture of prisoners seized in an illegal war, which was a violation of international law. They did these things and have since bragged about it during televised interviews with various news commentators.

Why, for example, did Democratic Speaker of the House refuse to allow Congress to hold impeachment hearings against both Bush and Cheney during the two years, from 2007 to 2009 that Democrats had control of the House?

Now that Bush is gone, his ghost appears to be lingering in the form of Texas Senator John Cornyn, the obvious leader of the gang that is rejecting Mr. Obama’s call for a new spirit of bi-partisan cooperation. Cornyn has managed to delay the confirmation of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the confirmation of Attorney General Eric Holder. He actually attempted to get Holder to pledge not to pursue torture prosecutions against Bush administration officials.

That the Republicans would stand, almost unanimously, against even the watered-down version of the Obama stimulus plan in the House, and are succeeding in stalling the vote on it in the Senate, with no one sure if there are enough votes to get the Senate version of it passed, is a sad commentary of our elected representatives.

They are squabbling over obvious inaccuracies and misdeeds while the economy of American business and industry is crashing. Thousands of people are losing their jobs daily because the money has dried up. Nobody can buy the things we make. People are losing their homes. Some are already dying in the streets.

Dick Cheney’s threat last week that dismantling the Bush Administration’s “tools” for battling terrorists would put us in the line of fire for yet another attack like 9-11 is misguided. That attack was directed at America’s financial institutions. At first we thought the attack failed. Events since 9-11, however, appear to have silently finished the job.