Sestak Watch

Navy insiders who have worked inside the Pentagon are fond of showing their war wounds from time spent in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel trenches. But all of them yield place of honor to those who worked for Vice Admiral Joe Sestak, Rear Admiral (ret). In a place where people are ground to fine powder as a matter of course, Sestak was considered the very avatar of a slave driver. It said a very great deal to the rest of the Navy when the oncoming CNO’s first official decision was to relieve Sestak of his duties and send him home, to Pennsylvania.

From whence, having been elected to Congress, he has continued his old ways, burning through staffers faster than Washington spends billions. Or nearly.

He can, to put it mildly, be an inconvenient ally:

The top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee says the Obama administration may have broken the law by offering Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) a job in order to persuade him not to mount a primary challenge against Sen. Arlen Specter.

Sestak has said that the administration offered him a high-ranking government job if he’d stay out of the race. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has been asked repeatedly about the accusation in recent weeks but so far has neither confirmed nor denied that a job was offered.

But in a letter to White House general counsel Robert Bauer Wednesday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said that, if Sestak’s allegation is true, administration officials may have violated a federal statute which makes it a crime for a government employee to use his authority “for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate” for certain offices, including Senate seats.

In his own mind, the admiral is no doubt the hero of the tale, surrounded on all sides by slackers and incompetents, held down by inferior beings who do not recognize his greatness.