Posted by
Camarco on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 4:08:23 PM
Wow! That was my response to president Obama's 'explanation' of why he illegally fired the inspector general of Americorp just recently. The law, just passed last year, requires the administration to give a 30 day notice and a publicly stated reason for the dismissal before terminating any inspector general (the inspectors general at the various federal agencies are there to ensure that public funds are being properly and legally spent). The Obama administration did neither when they summarily dismissed Mr. Walpin (IG of Americorp) the other day. Coincidentally, Walpin had been preventing a personal friend of the president's (a man who had been corruptly misusing government funds in the past) from receiving some of the TARP funds. Today, in response to media pressure, the president's staff came out with the alleged reason for firing the man. I was quite interested to hear what they might say, since there were no apparent non-corrupt reasons for wanting this man dismissed! ...They now claim that Walpin had been acting "confused and disoriented" and "unable to answer questions" at a recent board meeting, so that they could no longer have "confidence in his judgement". That's odd, because having carefully watched recent television interviews with Mr. Walpin, he struck me as being, if anything, unusually well- oriented and conspicuously unconfused! He not only answered the questions put to him by the T.V. interviewer (in one case I believe it was Glenn Beck), but answered them very clearly and very rationally! His primary concern appeared to be not his own termination, but the questionable ethics of what the administration was trying to do with some of the taxpayer's money (some of the TARP funds, in this case). But when I heard these sorts of accusations being made against the inspector general alarm bells immediately began going off in my head , because I am old enough to remember other government leaders who used to routinely make strikingly similar allegations in order to dispense with their own critics or political opponents (i.e., anyone who was inconvenient to them). ...That's right, I suddenly recalled, they were the leaders of the old Soviet Union ! Is that the direction our own government is now headed in?! Given that we do have good reason to believe that Mr. Walpin's ethical objections were proving inconvenient to the administration's current plans, do have reason to believe that some of those objections were well-founded, do know that his dismissal was not appropriately handled, in a transparent way, in accordance with the law, and do NOT have any good reason to believe the administration's claim that the inspector general has recently been "confused" or "disoriented" at all, it certainly does appear that way! And one final note: No American of good will wants to believe that our own government leaders are actually capable of behaving like fascists, or communist dictators, but if our Founders were right when they famously warned that "eternal vigilance" is the price we must pay for our liberty, then keeping a keen eye on government actions and statements such as these is a price that ALL Americans should be more than willing to pay. After all, it is just possible that it isn't Mr. Walpin but his superiors in the White House who have actually gotten "confused and disoriented". It could be that they have fallen prey to the delusion that the American taxpayer's money actually belongs to them, or have forgotten that "we, the people" can and will hold them to account for what they choose to do with it!