There’s a big hullabaloo today about Governor Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama. The endorsement was hailed as an important endorsement. It is thought that it will bring Hispanics to feast at Obama’s political table and he will deliver New Mexico into the Obama camp. Everyone is just ecstatic about it. Best of all, the Obama people are hoping, hoping, hoping that this makes people forget that he has aligned himself with hate-filled, racists, anti-American bigots for pretty much all of his adult life. They are hoping it’ll turn that page.

I’m sure the Clinton’s have to be steaming over this endorsement. After all, they made Richardson’s career. He didn’t have a political career before the Clintons decided that he would be the token Hispanic in their Rainbow Coalition. Its been straight uphill from there for him. He now is presented as the only Hispanic governor in the country. Apparently, he forgot who buttered his bread. Never mind, its only business.

Another thing he hopes the country has forgotten is what occurred under his watch at the Clinton Administration’s Energy Secretary.

There is more bad news for besieged Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, already scrambling to deal with horrendous security lapses at the nation’s top nuclear-weapons lab and soaring gasoline prices that have American motorists up in arms. Now two government reports obtained by Insight detailing other security problems within the department have intensified calls for the secretary’s head and doubts about whether the security overhaul he promised in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee case in any way has reversed long-standing laxity in the way the nation’s most sensitive nuclear facilities are being run.

According to one report, officials in the Department of Energy, or DOE, and at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — where two computer hard drives containing top-secret bomb designs recently went missing under suspicious circumstances — altered reports and pressured members of an internal-security assessment task force to soft-pedal shortcomings identified in annual reviews of the lab’s nuclear safeguards.

A second report, also from DOE’s inspector general, or IG, raises the possibility that sensitive information from the department’s Savannah River complex in South Carolina, not properly erased from computer systems that were sold as surplus, may have gone to the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.

That’s that messy little business of Richardson letting nuclear bomb secrets somehow mysteriously disappear in the hands of the Chinese back in Y2000. It happened twice in 2000 and involved Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese national who took classified information out of the labs at Los Alamos. The media and Congress were calling for Richardson’s head and decrying his lackadaisical style of management, carelessness and incompetency for extremely serious breaches of national security. The problem is, that was in 2000. It happened before most Americans had an idea of just how serious breaches in national security would soon become.

That scandal got forgotten in the aftermath of 9/11 as did many of the other national security breaches and/or mismanagement issues connected to the Clinton administration and their proxies.

So now this man who so badly mismanaged national security in the years just prior to 9/11 is endorsing Barack Obama for President. That doesn’t make me feel a bit safer and it doesn’t make me forget the glimpse into Obama’s character that we’ve been treated to over the past couple of weeks. I don’t think I’d be looking quite so smug if I were Obama.