OF SHARK TANKS AND BUS LINES

By Gary Aldrich
PatrickHenryCenter.com

As a former FBI Agent, I have lived on both coasts and in the middle.  For the past 24 years I have lived in a Shark Tank.  In 1986 the FBI transferred me to Washington DC and the first piece of advice I was given from an old salt FBI Agent was to be careful who I was talking to, and always remember that in Washington, D.C. perception is reality.

This strange advice was difficult to accept since the career I had chosen consisted of one central mission:  finding the truth – the kind of truth that would hold up in a court of law and would compel a jury to find the correct verdict.  Seeking real truth was the mission I was trained to perform and how I learned to successfully navigate the swampy waters of law enforcement.

The idea that there would be a relative truth associated with the FBI was unlike anything I had experienced before.

Soon after arrival in DC the FBI sent me over to Capitol Hill, and my re-education began.  My timing was good because Ronald Reagan was president – a friend to law enforcement and national security.  I learned that my assignment was predicated on the mess created out of the Raymond Donovan Senate confirmation hearings when the FBI was accused of botching his background investigation, leading to trouble in the Senate.  Democrats had discovered some questionable, unresolved activity and had amplified mere questions into absolute truth for themselves and their friends in the mainstream media.

After being cleared of all allegations, Raymond Donovan turned to the media and asked his famous question, “What department of the government do I apply to to get my reputation back?”

The Democrats made Donovan look wrong for the job, and the media made sure the Democrats' version of truth became holy writ.  Eventually they defeated the nomination.  As an outsider and an FBI Agent who was familiar with the real facts about Donovan, I found this process both puzzling and troubling.

I witnessed many other distortions over the years including the destruction of  the Senator from Texas, John Tower - with some conservatives helping to sink him, and then the high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas, the most unfortunate twisting of truth that I had ever seen, up to that point in my FBI career.

In 1995 I threw in the towel while I served in the Clinton White House.  I wrote a book about what I witnesses there, fed up with Washington, D.C.'s version of truth which was both wrong, and sad.  I was tired of having my stomach turned daily.  How far had we drifted, I thought, from what the Founding Fathers had imagined when they pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

That same twisting of truth and the use of clever perception-creation have turned two low-rent circuses - political parties - into visions of space shuttles and astronauts.  If one takes an objective look, these two entities are nothing more than bus lines, one being Trailways, and the other one Greyhound.

Worst of all, the “Trailways and Greyhound” bus drivers and their management have begun to believe their own press releases – they now think they are the real deal – astronauts on a mission to Mars – and they have tried to convince us they are NASA Headquarters, just housed in a different building. 

But in our hearts we know the facts suggest otherwise.  These parties – these self important, self serving incompetent bureaucracies are little more than musty smelling belching buses with coffee stained seats, offering last year's movies.  They can't even get us to the destination we want.  We know it and they know it, yet a lot of us help them maintain a pretense while they endlessly preen.

I agree that they are high fliers, but on what substance I am not sure.

Kool-Aid refuseniks have always understood the difference between winning and losing, excellence and mediocrity.  Before now there was nothing we could do about political parties because a mediocre bus service was the only transportation from point “a” to point “b.”   Now there is a new game in town because the parties refused to do their jobs.

Citizens of this country have risen up, calling themselves Tea Party Patriots, and other, similar names.  Yesterday they called themselves The Sons of Liberty and The Daughters of the American Revolution. 

It is the people who must save liberty or watch it stripped from our lives, day by day.