I wrote this morning about President Obama's extremely disturbing selection of Mary Robinson to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I made the point that the White House has a system to vet every person who comes in contact with the president, even those not receiving an award as prestigious as the MoF. To bolster my point, I called a friend who used to run the White House vetting system and asked him how long it would have taken him to discover that someone he had to vet, but had never heard of, would be a problem that needed to be flagged for the higher ups. I then asked him to try this exercise with the name "Mary Robinson." His response, after plying his trade:
"Ten seconds . . . first result in even the most basic google search."
Conclusion: The powers that be in the White House had to be either: incompetent, and not doing even the most basic reviews of people's backgrounds; or know, but not care, that this pick would be a big problem for the American Jewish community. I'm betting it was the latter.