Neal Boortz has a letter you should read.
Yeah … I guess it’s OK if you form a close relationship with a bomb-throwing terrorist, as long as he threw the bombs when you were a kid. Works for me. Work for you? In a similar vein, It must be OK if your pastor rails against America, as long as you aren’t in church on those particular days. Or maybe we should say as long as nobody remembers actually seeing you in church on those days.
One interesting point: If Barack Obama was applying for a security clearance as a government employee, these associations would disqualify him. We are, my friends, about to have a president who doesn’t qualify for a security clearance. Pretty pathetic. If Barack Obama becomes president, he would not even qualify to be his own bodyguard.
(Emphasis mine.)
The same was actually true of Clinton, if I remember correctly from Gary Aldrich’s book. He was the guy in charge of doing security clearances for the White House and basically got stonewalled on getting compliance from a lot of high-level employees—turns out there was contemporaneous drug use, etc., that would ordinarily be disqualifying. If I recall right, Aldrich said that if X, Y, and Z allegations against Clinton were true, Clinton wouldn’t have qualified for clearances.
He also noted that it’s a moot point: the President receives automatic clearance to everything by virtue of being President. (Which is as it should be, but puts us in a scary position when the media refuses to vet a candidate it supports, so that people with sketchy backgrounds or presents get bounced.)
Comment by Bill Walsh — 23 October, 2008 @ 14:52