Waters' concern for the drug epidemic affecting "my people" apparently begins and ends with town hall meetings. In the '90s, a joint federal and local Houston DEA task force pursued cocaine-dealing allegations of James Prince, a childhood friend of Maxine Waters' husband. Waters wrote a letter to then-Attorney General Janet Reno calling the investigation racially motivated, and demanded an end to the probe. She succeeded. This infuriated local DEA agents, one of whom later publicly stated: "The Justice Department in Washington turned their backs on a good agent and a good investigation. It appears the object was to get them to stop their investigation, and it appears that worked."
Waters rarely sees a white officer/black suspect encounter she cannot turn into a racial episode. In the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, a white police officer slammed a black youth on his car and later punched the youth because, according to the officer, the teen grabbed the officer's genitals.
Why, shades of Rodney King, according to Waters, who said: "I don't see white police officers slamming the heads of little white boys into police cars. I haven't seen them abusing white males. What I see is white police officers abusing black males, and young black males particularly. Yes, I believe it's racially motivated." Note: Inglewood, a town of over 100,000 people, consists of nearly all black and Hispanic residents. This automatically makes any white officer involved in a scuffle with practically any Inglewood suspect a target of accusations of racial discrimination and police brutality.
The congresswoman can dish it out, but what happens when people fight back? When an anonymous letter claimed that the Los Angeles Police Commission president, at a meeting, called her a "bitch," Waters went ballistic. She unsuccessfully demanded his resignation: "If it is all right for the Police Commission president to call a congresswoman a bitch, is it all right for police officers on the street to call women bitches?"
Waters currently faces an investigation by the House ethics committee. She phoned then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in 2008, asking his office to meet with minority bank owners. He complied. But most of the bankers in attendance were from OneUnited Bank -- a bank in which Waters' husband owned shares and on whose board he once served. OneUnited asked for a special bailout, and three months later, it received $12 million. The basis of the House ethics inquiry is why Waters failed to disclose to Paulson her personal financial interest in the bank bailout.
Waters' tea party attack once again exposes her as one of the most racist, hateful and vulgar members of Congress -- prompting Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to call her "vile." He was far too kind.