Democrats keep getting burned by shady pasts

See, it's not just Hillary that's getting tripped up here. Rep. Henry Waxman recently accused a contracting company, First Kuwaiti, of using de facto slave labor to build the new Iraqi embassy. Waxman's chief witness, Rory Mayberry, claimed that the Filipino laborers were told they were going to Dubai and only found out they were destined for Iraq on the plane. He also claimed they were treated inhumanely and suffered from poor working conditions and living conditions.

Which, maybe they did. I'm not surprised to hear about exploitative labor in the Middle East or, really, anywhere in the third world. (The Philippines government says that the workers knew they were going to Iraq all along.) But the interesting thing is that Waxman's witness isn't quite as credible as he's made out to be:

Did Rep. Henry Waxman, committee chairman, have any idea who Mayberry was when he asked him to testify before his oversight panel?

Extensive police and court records from Oregon and California show that Mayberry has a string of convictions going back to the mid-1980s, including two for forgery, one for burglary and a fourth for welfare fraud. In 2004, before heading off to Iraq to work as a medic, food service manager, radio technician, and sometime mortician, Mayberry was fined $4,000 for working as an embalmer without a license and for various Oregon state infractions as a “crematory operator,” records show.

This doesn't disprove what Mayberry says he saw. But it does make Waxman look either sloppy, or so desperate to hold hearings and raise more stink about Iraq he'll throw up anyone he can to testify. Or both.

Hmm...Democrats not doing criminal background searches...where have I heard that before?

Lots more good stuff at the WSJ's Washington Wire blog--including on Syria's nuke program and how Larry Craig's departure may have headed off another amnesty fight on the issue of legalizing agricultural workers, which Craig supported.