One of the many issues the main stream media has been failing to cover is that of the fraudulent contributions coming in by the truck load to the Barack Obama campaign coffers. Can you imagine the outcry if the John McCain campaign had dropped the security restrictions in their acceptance of online donations?
In National Review’s “the corner” blog Mark Steyn has addressed the strategy of the media regarding what little coverage you have seen:
There is an element of art to these calculations: The Obamatron editors in the media want to be able to cover themselves by saying they raised the story, but the trick is to do so at a time and place that prevents it going anywhere before November 4th.
There are several federal laws being violated every time someone uses the Internet to contribute to a campaign under a false name. And unless there is an investigation conducted by a government agency or private group that has plenty of resources, we’ll never learn just how extensive the fraud really is.
The Washington Post ran a story yesterday on the topic under the title:
Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations
Contributions Reviewed After Deposits
Here are the opening two paragraphs:
Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.
Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged.
No honest person would think this would be anything other than a huge national story being covered by newspapers and TV media outlets from coast to coast if this was the McCain-Palin campaign.
Sean Cairncross, chief counsel to the Republican National Committee is quoted in the story:
They have opened the floodgates to all this money coming in, I think they’ve made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn’t outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront.
No honest person believes they’re going to follow through with any serious effort to investigate illegal donations and refund money.
Again, Mark Steyn:
On the grubby little racket of his online credit card fraud, Senator Obama merely has to run out the clock now. If it’s not exposed before Tuesday, no one is going to have any appetite for investigating it once he’s won.
He notes this from the Post:
Here’s a glimpse of the scale of the [Obama’s] operation:
The Obama campaign has shattered presidential fundraising records, in part by capitalizing on the ease of online giving. Of the $150 million the senator from Illinois raised in September, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet.
So two-thirds of Obama’s record haul derives from a website that intentionally disabled all the default security checks that prevent basic fraud like fake addresses and no-name matches.
For Steyn, here’s the bottom line:
Two-thirds of the record-breaking haul Obama raised for the final stretch of the campaign comes from a racket set up to facilitate fake names, phony addresses and untraceable cards…
As Victor [Davis Hanson has said], this is part of a long pattern of behavior by Obama in which the noble ends of the Messiah’s triumph justify any means.
