Everyone has secrets, right? Everyone has done something he’d rather that others never know. And everyone has motives that are, on the odd occasion, less than perfectly praiseworthy.
But ought we to allow high officials and government agencies to have secrets? To allow people with power over you to have secrets seems illimitably dangerous. Governments and those within them wield coercive force. They claim immunity from penalty for the use of that force, under a notion that goes back to the days of the absolute monarch: “sovereign immunity.”
Of course, in the Land of the Formerly Free, that immunity vanishes if it turns out that the official had exceeded his authority, or had used it for venal purposes. Such instances expose the official to the same sort of indictment and trial that a commoner would face. However, as long as the official can credibly claim to have been honestly mistaken – perhaps misled by others with lower motives than his – he’ll get away with just about any infamy. The same goes for cops.
What endangers the corrupt or tyrannical official beyond all else is his paper trail. If there are records that would expose his corruption or tyranny, he will take pains to conceal them – to destroy them, if it lies within his power. The possibility of having them officially classified as secrets is often his best defense.
Joe Biden’s sexual assault accuser, Tara Reade, is calling for the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee and former senator to authorize the University of Delaware to release locked-away staff records pertaining to his 36 years in the Senate.In interviews this week, she said these records may contain the official complaint form she filed after Biden allegedly sexually assaulted her in 1993.
“I’m calling for the release of the documents being held by the University of Delaware that contain Biden’s staff personnel records because I believe it will have my complaint form, as well as my separation letter and other documents,” she said Tuesday to Fox News.
“Maybe if other staffers that have tried to file complaints would come to light — why are they under seal? And why won’t they be released to the public?”
How can we permit evidence of a sexual assault – a United States Senator’s digital penetration of an unwilling woman! – to be “sealed away” for any reason? What’s the rationale for “sealing” paperwork that lodges complaints against powerful officials? Isn’t this the exact reverse of the rule of law?
Yes, I’m laughing too.
Of course, the antiquated notion that no one is above the law fell into desuetude some time ago. These days “the rule of law” is merely a bit of rhetoric one side of an argument occasionally finds useful as a bludgeon or a distraction. It has no real force when a member of the political elite comes under public scrutiny.
Remember Barack Hussein Obama’s success at concealing all record of his years at Columbia University? Assuming he was ever there in reality, that is. No one who was there during his supposed years in attendance could remember him at all: not professors, not staffers, and not classmates. His matriculation records would have been of great interest to the public…but Columbia claimed it could not release them without Obama’s assent, which (of course) he withheld.
Perhaps this only works in one direction. When Obama first ran for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, his initial Republican opponent was Jack Ryan, a man of many achievements and sterling character. However, Ryan had one weak point: he’d once been married to starlet Jeri Ryan, she of the impressive bosom and minimal acting talent. The two had gone through a contentious divorce. The records of that divorce were sealed by mutual consent under a judge’s order, to protect their children from a barrage of innuendo…but Obama’s handmaidens in the Illinois press persuaded a judge to open them. The consequences included Ryan’s withdrawal from the race and the unaccomplished and relatively unknown Obama’s election over emergency replacement Republican candidate Alan Keyes.
It appears that some public figures have a right to conceal their records that others lack.
The degree of evil that occurs under official seal cannot be accurately known. It can only be estimated from what manages to seep out through those seals. While that’s a greater amount today than ever before, we cannot reliably infer from it how much (or how serious) remains safely concealed. There may be little or there may be much.
All of it, whatever its volume or magnitude, rests on the notion that a public official is allowed to keep secrets the rest of us could never manage to conceal. Under that scheme a man who was for 36 years a United States Senator, the chairman of several important committees including the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is now a major party’s nominee for the presidency, just might get away with rape. To thrust your fingers into the orifice of an unwilling woman is rape; be in no doubt about it. If records of Tara Reade’s complaint against Biden still exist, they would constitute nearly irreproachable confirmation of the event. But we are being denied all knowledge of them.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee vacillates over whether it must offer the American electorate Joseph Biden as its candidate for the most powerful office in the world. Stay tuned.
(For further criminality behind a veneer of public service, see this tale of the FBI’s deliberate entrapment of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and the subsequent concealment of the evidence that would exonerate him.)
Army Lieutenant General Flynn, not Vice Admiral...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rusty. Fixed. At least I remembered that he's an O-9. (:-)
ReplyDeleteI'm convinced these things surface when they do, to give us a laugh at the contortions of the Left, trying to explain how this is Totally Different than the NON-Leftist person who did much less, or had less evidence that he did anything.
ReplyDelete