Ignorant and hypocritical?

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As "October Surprises" in a midterm election year go, the Obama administration's public tiff with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over whether the latter takes foreign money illegally seems a small potato, but also perhaps a hot one.

Nonpartisan fact-checking discredited the original charge almost as soon as it was made. True to form, however, the vice-president -- he who implied recent visits to a long-closed eatery in his home district -- was a little slow on the uptake.

As to why the tiff is a stupid one to have in the first place, well, there are positive and negative reasons. Let's remember that business members of the Chamber of Commerce actually create jobs. Moreover, one of the things I encountered while perusing an angry new book (Pamela Geller's The Post-American Presidency) was this very interesting quote from Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. In May, 2009, Stern bragged to Michael Mishak, reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, that "We [the SEIU] spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it."

Given that admission and the name of the union, would it be uncouth to wonder how much of its own dues were a) foreign and b) illegally used to influence an American election? (If SEIU collects no dues from foreign members, then in what sense would it be "international"?)

(The book, by the way, is worth reading, although flawed by indifferent editing and Geller's penchant for hyperbole. There is considerable evidence to back Geller's overall assessment of the Obama presidency, but I could never figure out why a rogue paragraph about fraud in global warmism dropped unexpectedly into a discussion of sharia law on p. 25, for example, or why Geller describes Obama's presidency as "lethal for Israel" rather than simply "dangerous" to that ever-beleaguered country; one can only hope she's not prescient about Israel's fate. But flaws like those are easily forgivable in an otherwise-useful compendium of offenses that does a slow boil through 300 scary pages and is vouchsafed by heavy hitters like John Bolton and Robert Spencer.)