Less than a week before Americans will elect their next president, the Washington Post decided to do some origional reporting and research. As many bloggers, pundits and even National Journal have made clear in recent weeks, and the WaPo confirmed today: the Obama campaign is purposefully accepting untraceable donations.

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

The excuse of the Obama campaign is that there were so many individuals who wanted to donate through the Internet, that they felt forced to make it easier for such individuals to do so. Which is, of course, not much of an excuse; instead, it is a reason.

In common language we use such reasons greed.

Is the system abused? Darn right it is:

The Obama team’s disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama’s FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

The Obama campaign defends itself as well by arguing that it does a ‘rigorous’ investigation afterwards. The only people who believe that, of course, are apologists. Obama et alia take their time to refund illegal donations, and have purposefully done so in order to be able to use the money first, in the most expensive campaign in history.

This was done on purpose. There are, as the WaPo makes clear, security measures, used by all other campaigns. The Obama campaign decided not to use those measures because… they wanted money.

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