On March 11, President Barack Obama issued a statement criticizing earmarks, including those that �have been used as a vehicle for waste, fraud and abuse....inserted at the eleventh hour, without review, and sometimes without merit, in order to satisfy the political or personal agendas of a given legislator, rather than the public interest.�

The President took no questions, but scurried into the deep recesses of the White House to privately sign, into law, a $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill that contained almost 9,000 earmarks totaling roughly $8 billion.  Those included earmarks requested by Senator Obama before he became President, but from which his name had been disappeared, as if by a Mexican drug cartel.  Earmarks bearing the names of Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel, now ensconced in the Obama administration, remained.

As ABC�s Jake Tapper, soon to be the first White House correspondent appointed to President Obama�s enemies list, points out, Candidate Obama left the campaign trail in 2008 to return to Washington.  It was urgent that he, along with fellow candidates Clinton and McCain, vote for an amendment that would have imposed a one-year moratorium on earmarks for fiscal year 2009. 

Then, Candidate Obama said, �We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress� seniority, rather than the merit of the project....And we can no longer accept an earmarks process in which many of the projects being funded fail to address the real needs of our country.�  The amendment failed, as everyone who can function without a guardian knew it would.

The omnibus appropriations bill which Obama just signed is for fiscal year 2009.  Never mind, he�s going to stop in the future that which he opposed last year and opposes now, but signed anyway, signaling, as he said, an �end to the old way of doing business.�  Count on it, all of you who are naive beyond redemption.

President Obama�s Dance of the Ultimate Hypocrite followed by one day the equally orchestrated Senate vote on the bill, a voice vote.  There is only one reason for a voice vote in the Senate on such an urgent and important-to-the-Republic expenditure:  to cover the tender, bipartisan asses of those who voted for it. 

Surely, it was only an Act by the Gods of Coincidence that 60 percent of the earmarks went to Democrats, 40 percent to Republicans.  Why, that�s almost the exact make-up of the Senate.  And you believed that malarkey about Republicans going to rehab?  What silly, silly citizens you are.

To safeguard her position in the Hypocrites League,  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued new �rules,� earmark reforms, mind you, that will make things ever so much better in the future.  (Have you run outside and started singing �Tomorrow� yet?) 

That would be the same Nancy Pelosi who successfully threatened that if the Senate made any changes in the $410 billion bill passed by the House, why, she would just scrap it and the government would have to run on a Continuing Resolution for the remainder of 2009.  That was no threat to the government, which would have saved a big old bunch of money and continued to run at current expenditure levels, but to the earmarkers, who got the message.

This, then, is your President, your Congress, your government, publicly emitting the �swine odor� that came to symbolize this just-passed earmark process.  Only you can handle the �manure management� part of the project.  Don�t let the unpleasantness of that make it one of those jobs Americans won�t do.