Political Thoughts with Richard Bleil
Another day, another secret document where it shouldn’t be. It seems as of lately they are finding more secret documents in homes and offices of former presidents than I’m finding potato chips in my couch. As many secret documents as they’re finding, it’s beginning to make me wonder just how secret these documents really are.
Okay, let’s get this out of the way. So far, the documents have been found in the offices of Trump and Biden (from when he was vice president). To the best of my knowledge, no documents have been found in other former presidents’ offices, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not there. It’s entirely possible that nobody has looked for them yet.
This is an outstanding opportunity for people to be hypocritical. I’ll admit, I can’t stand Trump. I’ll be the first to admit that, yes, he did some things while in office that weren’t completely awful, but for the most part, his actions were contrary to my sense of equality, charity and understanding and usually seemed to favor his wealthy buddies over the general citizenship. When secret documents were found in his residence, I was shocked and disturbed. And while I do like Biden better than Trump, I’m not a fan of his either. Trump strikes me as the loudmouth opinionated drunk uncle that ruins Thanksgiving, while Biden strikes me as the quiet drunk uncle that just falls asleep. But to be upset because these documents were found in Trump’s possession but no in Bidens (or vice versa if you prefer Trump over Biden) is what I mean by hypocritical. To me, it’s shocking and disturbing that they were found in the possession of both of them. Yes, admittedly, a rather excessively large cache (too large to discount as simply lost in the shuffle and forgotten) in Trump’s possession, but depending on the sensitivity of the documents found, it’s a problem in both cases.
I do distinguish between how the two are handling the discoveries. Trump, in his usual fashion, refused to cooperate and spewed lies trying to discount and cover up the discoveries while Biden seems to be cooperating. The subpoenas and sudden FBI search warrant were the results of Trump’s failure to cooperate in the discovery process. I don’t feel bad that Trump was put through that, nor do I see it as a difference in the way the two are treated, as I’m guessing that had Trump cooperated such actions would not have been necessary. Any legal actions that result from the way he responded will probably not bother me either. As Republicans are trying to find dirt to impeach Biden and make anybody they can think of run the political gauntlet, it seems interesting that they seem to forget the one person who is mostly responsible for the actions against Trump, namely, Trump himself.
As I try to imagine how this must have happened, it strikes me that the Presidency of the United States is a job for an amateur. An argument could be made about any president that wins a second term, but if you think about it, any president who already has experience in the office is not allowed to hold the position. Every time we put in a new president so far, the new president has been an amateur with no experience as president. This is how the US Constitution set up the office, but what an interesting concept. It’s true that some presidents have more political experience than others, but not as president directly. Before Trump, with absolutely no political experience at all, George Bush, Jr. (the second President Bush) had the least political experience with only governorship experience under his belt, and he basically started but never finished two wars (including the Afghanistan war which lasted two decades) and collapsed the world economy. Trump, with zero political experience, seemed well on his way to doing worse.
This makes me wonder why somebody isn’t responsible for tracking documents like this. Even when I check a book out of a library, the librarian makes sure to track what, exactly I have, and there is file of what is in my possession, and most of those book do not contain national secrets. So we let amateurs carry these documents out the office to their homes, and nobody knows that these documents are out in unsecured locations? This strikes me as very (very!) odd. Is this how Snowden managed to get so many secret files? Because nobody was tracking them, who has access, and where they are being held? It seems to me that this situation is screaming for a revamping, creation of a position or maybe a government entity (like, some kind of…national archive, maybe?) that tracks where these documents are and who has them.
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