What a week for trustworthiness. The U.S. intelligence community is looking to develop methods that would give clues to who can be trusted, or who is trustworthy. In the same week we have ACORN announcing they are closing down their operations we’re looking for methods to identify trustworthiness. I’m guessing they will reconstitute themselves, let’s wait and see what they call themselves next. In the same week a former representative is convicted of 14 counts of corruption, we’re still looking for clues to identify trustworthiness. In the same week our Congress buys off some, threatens others and claims they are looking out for the little guy, and we find out they violated their own rules, we are still looking for tips on trustworthiness.
It is important that our intelligence and law enforcement community be able to identify trustworthiness in the people they deal with so they can keep us safe. But, I’ll bet they can do that already, if we let them. Our problem is we will not permit them to identify those who are not trustworthy. If you wonder who is trustworthy, trust them until they show that they aren’t trustworthy and then don’t believe them at all.
We can’t use every day trustworthiness tests in our public affairs. The TSA will pull every tenth person out of the line at the airport rather than someone who looks like a mid-eastern terrorist because that would be profiling and we all know that profiling is bad. It isn’t bad if we pull out an 80 year old woman with a cane and search her for bombs because it was just her turn. We didn’t do it because she was a white woman we did it because she was tenth in line. That is where we have come in our truth meter.
If you were aware of this type of activity in the 1970’s you will remember the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They were a group of Germans who were the leftist radicals of the time. If you don’t remember them by name, or nationality, maybe you will remember them as the terrorists in the raid at Entebbe. Back then, when we were looking for them and the Red Army Faction, profiling wasn’t an issue because they were blonde haired and blue eyed criminals. Those radicals didn’t violate our new found sensitivities.
We were taught as children how to test trustworthiness why don’t we just remember what we were taught? Is a community activist group that continues to violate federal and state laws a bad organization that should not be trusted? Does it take trying to fix an election and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to make people see how bad they are? Or should we have seen it before they closed their doors? Does an elected official who is convicted of 14 felonies get to cry foul because he wasn’t convicted of another 100 crimes?.
The President said that health care reform has been 100 years in the making. Let’s see, that would mean he is speaking of the Progressive Era that brought us President Wilson and the Depression. You see, in the U.S. it was called the Progressive Era, in Russia it was the Bolshevik Revolution, in Germany it was National Socialism. Trustworthiness surely is needed at the federal level but when someone shows you or tells you what they are, and it is not flattering, believe them. We only have to look at the facts, just the facts.
