Obama's Big Donors Become His Diplomats

 

Last night on Fox News, Sean Hannity highlighted a Harper’s magazine article detailing the many diplomatic posts that President Obama (who raked in some $600 million in contributions to his presidential campaign) has awarded to major campaign donors. In honor of the “Cash for Clunkers” program, one might call this “Donations for Diplomacy.”

According to Harper’s:

Donald Beyer, a car dealer from Northern Virginia, was appointed as Obama’s ambassador to Switzerland. One of Obama’s earliest and most active supporters in Virginia, Beyer is reportedly responsible for raising $500,000 for the Obama campaign.

Amusingly, Beyer was held up as a figure of fun by the Weekly Standard‘s Jonathan Last back in 2006, when Last wrote:

Don Beyer Volvo is offering a new promotion. If you buy one of their cars, the dealership will give you free tickets to Al Gore‘s global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Mr. Beyer is a Democrat in good standing, having been lieutenant governor of Virginia and national treasurer of the Dean for America campaign, so he must be down with the global warming program.

But giving away movie tickets with the purchase of every climate-destroying luxury automobile (the 2005 Volvo XC90 gets 15 mpg in the city and 20 mpg on the highway) probably isn’t, in the long run, the most effective way to save the planet.