WHAT IS WITH THESE BOYS? - AT 10:34 A.M. ET:  Is this the gang that still can't shoot straight? 

You'd think, after the number of embarrassing federal appointments, the Obama employment agency would toughen its vetting.  Well, either it can't, it won't, or it really has no problem with some of the borderline flakes who wind up getting tapped.  From Fox News:

President Obama's recent nominee for ambassador to El Salvador was forced to withdraw her nomination to another diplomatic post a decade ago following concerns about ties to Cuba, raising red flags as her name heads to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee once again for approval.

The White House announced the nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte last Wednesday along with a handful of other appointments. The selection has started to draw some attention given that former President Clinton nominated her for ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 1998, only to see the nomination fizzle after the foreign relations panel questioned her over her past relationship with someone who had apparently caught the attention of the FBI.

One former official with knowledge of that nomination said the committee started scrutinizing Aponte after learning that she had attended a party at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City, and that she had a relationship with someone, Roberto Tamayo, who had raised concern at the FBI over "possible ties to the Cuban government" and "repeated trips there."

The former official said the matter "sure as hell" should come up this time around.

"I think it's a mistake to have someone who did not pass muster before to be nominated again," the former official told FoxNews.com. "It shows a disrespect to the process I think. ... Hopefully there'll be somebody on the committee who takes a sober look at the record."

COMMENT:  Are the Obamans looking for trouble?  With all the qualified, Spanish-speaking Americans who could have been appointed, why choose someone with this kind of baggage?  In a way, this is an insult to the Hispanic community. 

But, sadly, it appears that nominees who may have a loyalty issue in their past are no problem at all with the hip "progressives" in Obamaland.  When the president gets back from Copenhagen, having cooled the planet and made the oceans recede with the wave of a Charlton Heston poster, maybe he should look into his own administration's personnel policies.

December 18, 2009