It is admirable indeed that the Wall Street Journal’s open-minded opinion pages give voice to Rahm Emanuel’s warning that, according to the “broken window” theory, there are hints of corruption surrounding the Trump administration.
The broken windows theory is a sociological concept that suggests addressing the first signs of disorder, such as graffiti, can prevent more serious crime. In the context of modern politics, Emanuel argues that the Trump administration’s disregard for minor ethical breaches may be fostering a culture permissive of significant corruption. One wonders, though, if in Emanuel there could be a more poorly miscast angel of deliverance from governmental evil.
Emanuel’s thesis is that, in past decades, the county has reacted strongly against the slightest hint of political misconduct. However, according to his broken windows analogy, we are now normalizing petty Donald Trump-centric graft. This portends bad things for our society, this professedly ethical messenger warns us.
He explains that society formerly made a big deal about the slightest wrongs, such as those committed by presidential son Neil Bush and presidential brother Billy Carter. But the present regime is now “breaking widows such that few will pay close attention to behavior that is more devious and self-serving.”
Emanuel, however, picks an odd example of supposedly unacknowledged petty graft: the $50,000 FBI undercover “sting” payment to future border czar Tom Homan, allegedly made while he was still a private citizen. While legal experts have universally opined that this was a nothing-burger, the tableau in fact generated wide condemnation of Homan, not of the Biden DOJ’s transparently political entrapment scheme. So, oddly, the wide publicity given to Homan’s broken window seems to contradict this broader claim.
But even though his article fails to enrage, it does serve to apply the broken windows theory to examine our political culture in the post-Watergate era.
Watergate itself was broken windows run amok, as a successful presidency was ruined by excessive media hype of a burglary unknown to the White House. The antidote to this overplayed corruption was the proudly pious Jimmy Carter. But did the media, as in Watergate, pounce on hints of Carter corruption? According to Emanuel, it went overboard on a mere peccadillo of brother Billy: “Billy Carter… merely registered as a foreign agent of Libya after receiving $220,000 from the Libyan government, rather than before.”
In homing in on Billy Carter, this political hack could not have drawn a better example of the media double standard that defines the post-Watergate era. It is broken windows for thee, but not for me.
Billy Carter was, in fact, a secretly paid agent of what was then our country’s biggest terrorist enemy, Libya, paid to report on his brother’s intimate family conversations. The Justice Department was considering indicting Billy for denying his agency when a stunning fact was reported to Carter’s Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti: Billy had taken a hidden $220,000 payment from Libya, while he had continually denied to investigators any compensation whatsoever. His indictment by the competent “line” prosecutors was now, it seemed, inevitable. With this open-and-shut proof of payment, there could be no better example of the post-Watergate nostrum “no man is above the law” than this.
But these honest civil servants never got the opportunity to do their job. Before they could act, Civiletti met privately with President Carter to inform him of his sleazy, sweetheart resolution: the Justice Department would bring a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution, against Billy. Even at that, Billy refused to cooperate in this whitewash, would still not admit his agency, and simply defaulted on the Complaint.
After Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, polite Republican lockjaw senators refused to embarrass the ex-President, who thereafter continued his admirable, if sanctimonious, post-Presidency. But, as Emanuel alluded, Neil Bush received far more condemnation merely for sitting on the Board of one of the thousands of savings and loans that failed during the financial crisis.
Thus began the true saga of our modern media era: Republican “broken windows” were condemned, while flagrant Democrat criminality was excused. Viewed through this lens, Emanuel’s article continues this hypocrisy.
What more wrongdoing has been overlooked by the media’s blindness to Democrat broken windows? Just a few examples should suffice.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton, for a large donation, sold American missile guidance technology to China, which our adversary still uses today.
Senator Barack Obama bought his impressive Chicago residence using a poorly disguised $625,000 payment (for the worthless adjoining lot) routed from Saddam Hussein’s cousin at Banco de Paribus to Obama crony, the criminal Tony Rezko, and then into this home purchase. Yet, as its darling ran for the presidency, the media insisted there was nothing to see here, even though this corruption was connected to Iraq’s cheating on the UN Oil-for-Food program.
This pro-Iraq payment paled in comparison to the $145 million paid to the Clinton Foundation by grifters needing Hillary Clinton’s State Department to approve the sale of Uranium One to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, giving Putin pricing power over American nuclear utilities.
Hillary’s overlooked corruption then paved the way for the entire legacy media to agree that there was no “proof” that Hunter Biden’s corrupt millions had nothing to do with his father, even though Hunter’s laptop seemed to suggest an equal partnership between the two.
It was the State Department policy that Ukraine should not obtain lethal weaponry from America until the country was certified as non-corrupt, as finally occurred under Petro Poroshenko in early 2019.
Before that time, it appeared that then-Vice President Joe Biden had caused the looting of billions in foreign aid by Ukrainian kleptocrat Igor Kolomoisky, represented by Hunter Biden and protected by the Vice President’s firing of Ukraine’s honest Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin.
Even though Poroshenko thereafter righted the Ukrainian ship, he was soon defeated by Volodymyr Zelensky, a protégé of Kolomoisky. With lethal weaponry now approved because of Poroshenko, but not yet delivered to Ukraine, shouldn’t the new Zelensky presidency show that it was not corrupt before receiving these weapons?
When President Trump withheld the weaponry from Zelensky until Biden-centric corruption was investigated, the blustery Trump was actually following State Department policy, unreported of course, by the media. Was Trump, however biased he may have been against Biden, praised for this? Of course not. Democratic corruption was, once again, protected by the media, as Democrats impeached Trump, with no hint published of State Department policy implications.
Query: How many Ukrainians have died for want of billions of dollars in military aid pocketed by corrupt actors, still, as we speak, being stolen under American noses?
Thus, in one sense, Emanuel’s article reveals much, however unintentionally. This Chicago crony, too corrupt even for that city, was driven from his mayoralty for his cover-up of sickening police brutality. But there is little mention of that, while he occupies a media bully pulpit to criticize Trump.
As has been so for the past five decades, this swamp creature is permitted to sermonize against petty Republican broken windows. And the WSJ’s conservative Editors, in the best American traditions of free speech, politely allow this drivel on their Opinion pages.
However, properly contextualized, Emanuel’s piece should tell us all we need to know about modern American political corruption.
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