Marion Barry for Drug Czar

Best of the Web Today: Marion Barry for Drug Czar
By JAMES TARANTO
If a certain sort of conservative tends to be moralistic about sex, liberals tend to be moralistic about money. That makes Tom Daschle the equivalent of a televangelist caught in a sex scandal.

Daschle, now President Obama's nominee for secretary of health and human services, was first elected to Congress in 1978 as a Democrat from South Dakota. In 2004, in the final throes of the Bush majority, voters ousted him from the Senate.

Forced into the private sector, he returned to Aberdeen, S.D., and eked out a living growing wheat on the Daschle family farm. As if! Actually, he stayed in Washington, joined a lobbying firm--albeit as a 'special policy adviser,' since as a former senator he was prohibited by law from 'lobbying'--and raked in the bucks. The prairie populist became a plutocrat, as the Washington Post reports:

Without becoming a registered lobbyist, he made millions of dollars giving public speeches and private counsel to insurers, hospitals, realtors, farmers, energy firms and telecommunications companies with complex regulatory and legislative interests in Washington.
Daschle's expertise and insights, gleaned over 26 years in Congress, earned him more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry, and perks such as a chauffeured Cadillac, according to the documents.

We thought of a catchy term for people who claim to be tribunes of the poor while getting driven around by a chauffeur. We're going to call them 'limousine liberals.'

Anyway, there was one little 'glitch,' as the Washington Post calls it. Daschle, who in 1998 said, 'Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter' "