Democrat Confronted Over His Share Of $6.4 Billion ‘Clerical Error’

First, the facts of the matter:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

Now, the reaction by a powerful Democrat to the facts of the matter:

Video: When Jason Met Jim
posted at 8:45 am on April 1, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

I think it’s fair to assume that Jason Mattera failed to make a sale of his new book, Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, in his meeting with Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA).  Jason introduces himself as a constituent from Virginia’s 12 Congressional District, which exists only in the fevered imagination of Porkulus data entry operators, as a way to make a point about the $6.4 billion that got lost in the tracking system for stimulus spending.  When Jason challenges Moran on the issue, it gets ugly very quickly — and Moran’s professional aides keep Moran from making a bad mistake (video by The College Politico):

There is some truth in Moran’s statement, but it’s still a ridiculous dodge.  We’re not talking about a few rounded-up pennies that didn’t get tracked properly.  We’re talking about $6.4 billion dollars that wound up being reported to non-existent CDs like VA-12.  That’s $6,400,000,000, which is more than what Democrats claimed as revenue from revoking that tax credit for employers who kept retirees on their prescription drug plans.  As I wrote at the time, it wouldn’t have taken a database genius to devise an entry system that tested for that kind of bad data, and in the meantime it meant that billions of dollars couldn’t be tracked.

Calling that a “clerical error” is rather jaw-dropping, considering the fortune that went untracked as a result.  Moran’s aide at the end affirmed the obvious: Jason made his point … which is probably why Moran’s other aides had to restrain the Congressman.  Kudos to those aides for handling that situation about as well as they could.

$200 million dollars as a “clerical error.”  Which is just one non-existent district in Virginia’s share of a $6.4 billion “clerical error.”

That’s right.  Billions of dollars of government money just disappeared in the most blatantly obvious form of fraud, and we can dismiss it and ‘show respect” to Democrats because it was just a “clerical error”

I can’t help but wonder if some Nazi bureaucrat tried to weasel out of his crimes at the Nuremberg trials by saying the whole Holocaust thing was a “clerical error”???