Who’s got the courage to stop it? Who’s got the integrity to stop it? Who will end the rhetorical spin and thus end the eroding trust we have in government?
As said well by CBS host Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” in February: “When government officials insult us with spin they’re doing it on our dime, which is supposed to be used to operate the government, not to hold news conferences to tell us what a fine job people on the public payroll are doing. As we learned during Katrina, self-serving spin at the first sign of crisis does not help the situation. It makes it worse. Because it makes it harder to believe anything the government says. Real security is built on trust in the government. That requires truth, which should be the beginning of government presentations, not the fallback position.”
From Katrina to current day, from Republicans to Democrats, our federal government is making it hard to believe anything they say. They continue to “spin” instead of offer truth and be transparent. What happened to the realization that truth and transparency are necessary components of integrity? Do our elected officials have such tunnel vision, that integrity is a willing sacrifice? Why do so exceedingly many believe in not telling the truth? Note that this deception takes various forms: lying, exaggeration, and omission. Each is an intentional tactic in which the truth remains untold. Our leaders may not lie, but perhaps they have a penchant for hyperbole. Maybe they make up their own statistics and facts. Maybe they are eerily silent. Maybe they commission their PR people to craft better sounding answers to the most revealing, condemning questions. Each equates to not telling the truth. Each is a lack of integrity.
Like many of you, I’ve watched closely what’s happening in the IRS. This is significant; if the IRS lacks integrity, we all could become victims of injustice — not just the conservative groups the IRS was previously, knowingly targeting. But no one will tell us the truth. No one will answer the questions. People who are paid and elected by the public are not acting with integrity nor forthcoming with answers. They are only, sadly generous with rhetorical spin. From the IRS official Lois Lerner who again pleaded the 5th last week to Pres. Obama’s offering that there wasn’t even a “smidgen of corruption” in the process, no one is being transparent with the truth. Note the following communications by Lerner, who still refuses to testify…
In September 2010, Lerner wrote: “Ok guys. We need to have a plan. We need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project. More a c4 project that will look at levels of lobbying and pol. activity along with exempt activity.”
A month later, in a speech at Duke University, referring to the Citizens United decision, Lerner said the Supreme Court “dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn’t give directly to political campaigns... The FEC can’t do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem… Everybody is screaming at us right now: ‘Fix it now before the election. Can’t you see how much these people are spending?’ “
Then 4 months later, Lerner wrote: “Tea Party Matter very dangerous. This could be the vehicle to go to court on the issue of whether Citizens United overturning the ban on corporate spending applies to tax-exempt rules.”
Is Lerner guilty of something? I don’t claim to know that.
Is the Obama administration guilty of something? I don’t claim to know that either.
The Intramuralist has not nor cannot conclude that anyone is guilty of something specific. I do, however, humbly submit that their lack of truth telling and use of rhetorical spin are dishonest. Such a lack of integrity causes trust in our government to continue to erode.
Respectfully,
AR
Many believe withholding some of the truth is not lying even though others then draw conclusions that are not truthful.