Rich Lowry wrote a great commentary on Democrats who themselves become filthy rich using the same tax code that Mitt Romney uses, even while they demonize those that do. It is a laugh. I mean are we to believe that Barack Obama with all his book royalties, isn’t filthy rich? And that his tax accountants aren’t right now exploiting the same Congressionally-crafted tax loopholes as any other wealthy American would?

For that matter, I recall in 2004 two of the most brazen and wealthy Americans — John Edwards and John “Heinz Ketchup” Kerry — running on the Democrat ticket. Where was the outrage then?

Here’s Lowry:

Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”

Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?

Presumably Cutter wanted to be as well compensated as possible, by J.C. Flowers and the “several Fortune 500 companies” her communications firm served, according to her bio. This is utterly unremarkable but for the fact that she is part of an Obama team that argues there is something inherently wrong with income inequality. In his signature Osawatomie, Kan., speech, President Barack Obama asserted that rising inequality hampers those at the bottom. If that’s so, shouldn’t the people around him endeavor to keep from adding to the injustice by making too much money?

But none of them goes out and gets poor. Very few of them, it seems, even go out and get middle-class. They get rich. Many of them climb right into the 1 percent. Obama economic adviser Alan Krueger gave a speech recently lamenting the shrinking middle class, without mentioning that the reason for its diminishment is that so many people have risen all the way out of the middle. By Krueger’s (perverse) standard, major Obama officials have heedlessly contributed to the destruction of the American middle class by earning too much.

Consider only the chiefs of staff. President Obama’s new chief of staff, Jacob Lew, made $1.1 million in one year working for Citigroup. His prior chief of staff, William Daley, made $8.7 million in roughly one year working for JPMorgan Chase. His original chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made $16 million working for an investment firm. Judging by this record, President Obama only feels comfortable entrusting his affairs to men who have earned outrageous paydays.

The Obama 1 percenters abound. President Obama’s first national economic director, Larry Summers, earned $600,000 as president of Harvard, then went to a hedge fund where he made $5 million in one year, before joining the administration. His first budget director, Peter Orszag, left to make $2 million to $3 million a year at Citigroup. His current national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, got $7 million from his work at Fannie Mae from 2000 to 2003.

Certainly Obama’s top aides don’t have to make millions in finance, but they’d almost have to go out of their way not to get rich. In the aggregate, they are smart, highly educated, and hard-working. They tend to marry people with the same characteristics. They have relatively stable families. They have success — indeed, the 1 percent — written all over them. They probably would be scandalized to work at a private-sector job paying “only” $50,000, the median household income in the U.S.

In a report that has the tone of a revelation about it, the New York Times discovered that the 1 percent is a “varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set.” By one estimate, the 1 percent starts at households making $380,000 a year. That means in 2005, Michelle Obama alone was almost making enough to hoist the Obama household into the dreaded 1 percent with her $316,962 job at the University of Chicago Hospital.

Is it too much to ask that one high-profile Obama official leave government and refuse to make more than $70,000 a year out of solidarity with the middle class and commitment to income equality? Of course it is. Just as the definition of a recession is when someone else loses a job, greed is when someone else makes a lot of money. For anyone hoping to get to the top, the collective message of current and former Obama officials should be clear: Do as they do, not as they say.

It’s a shame that Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, et. al. spent so much time mimicking Democrats in demonizing Mitt Romney for being rich because if nothing else it takes their eye off the ball — defeating a quite weak President Obama by focusing their energies on his truly poor economic decisions. I realize that there needs to be some weeding out of candidate positions and that before they can run on Obama they must run on their immediate competition, but every minute spent off of Obama’s economy is a minute for which Obama is grateful.

Case in point: the recent decision by the Obama Administration to block (semantics aside, let’s call it what it is) to Canadian Keystone pipeline.

The decision is disastrously bad for a number of reasons, which will be highlighted, but even more striking is that they go against the very advice of his own economic and energy advisers and cabinet members. For example, here’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu:

“Having Canada as a supplier of our oil is much more comforting than having other countries supply our oil.”

Wow. No brainer, right? I mean how much grief do Democrats supply in every election cycle about the amount of oil we import from the Middle East. It is, they always tell us — albeit inaccurately and without factual merit — the reason for The Gulf War and 2004 invasion of Iraq. So, if that be the case, why not at least choose to get a larger proportion from our friends?

Of course, here’s the thing. Oil is fungible. It’s a commodity that can be bought and resold 100 times over before it reaches the American consumer. And whether or not an American president chooses to partner with Canadians determined to drill their own territory won’t change that fact. Thus the inevitable — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, fine, if you don’t want to partner with our pipeline than perhaps the Chinese will be interested.

You could say that with that decision, to borrow a quote from our current first lady, I’ve never been more proud of the Canadians. I don’t blame them. They’ve got a resource to sell. If we don’t want it, others do. And here’s the great irony. Not only will we be potentially buying Chinese oil then, but should the production price become cheaper than what some of our “enemy” countries can do, they may be prone to buy the Canadian-Chinese oil and turn around and sell back to the US too. That’s how commodities work.

But it gets even better. First, as historian Victor Davis Hanson labels it, and I do love this, it is “the antithesis of Solyndra.” The Chinese, and not Americans, get an estimated 10-20 thousand production jobs.

Here’s the most ironic and comical angle though — Obama’s decision is at best a zero-sum protection for the environment, and more than likely even worse for the environment. Like the Canadian PM said — they’re drilling, baby, whether we like it or not. The impact to the environment is therefore moot. It’s analogous to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — whether we do or not the Cubans, Chinese, Venezuelans and others will. By taking part you can at least take the lead in doing it as cleanly as possible whereas if you forgo doing so you give no reason for another country to follow suit with improving standards and technology. And if an oil spill can occur in Canada (or the Gulf) from American mishap, the chances are even greater so when it’s China doing the work, or Cuba doing the Gulf drilling.

Here’s Hanson again:

If the Keystone project raises environmental issues, then every other comparable one would too. It is not as if the route bisects Yosemite on its way to Big Sur. How strange — we assume that the Saudis or the Turks can build pipelines across their own lands without environmental problems, but that we, the apparently less technologically advanced, cannot. We hear that oil is “fungible”; if so, each barrel that we pass on, someone else less green won’t.

With that decision — or rather lack thereof — we abrogate our leadership position and lose all influence to pressure these other countries into stricter standards. We accept all of the risk, with zero of the benefit. Bravo Obama!