This week we discover Secret Service agents steping over the line of honor and integrity…while on assignment!  In our own GOP primaries, voters find themselves having to decide between great men with great speaking ability, who try to deflect attention away from absence of character in their personal lives.  Peggy Noonan writes today that we are in a new time, when character is secondary to self-interest.

What women are looking for in 2012, are leaders with character AND skills.

Why?  Because as we look at the day-to-day decision-making in The White House, more and more Americans have a sense that the direction of the country is determined by opportunism, paybacks, and to preserve POWER.

Read a bit today about how Peggy Noonan frames the problem:

“Now I’d go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He’s pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They’re too busy taping it on their smartphones. That’s how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: “flash robs.”

Flash Mobs Are Trendy...But Sometimes Publicly Destructive

That’s just the young, you say. Juvenile delinquency is as old as history.

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She’s the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore.

GSA Official Before Congress This Week...And Also...Bathing On The Taxpayer.

There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers.

The reason the story is news, and actually upsetting, is not that a government agency wasted money. That is not news. The reason it’s news is that the people involved thought what they were doing was funny, and appropriate. In the past, bureaucratic misuse of taxpayer money was quiet. You needed investigators to find it, trace it, expose it. Now it’s a big public joke. They held an awards show. They sang songs about the perks of a government job: “Brand new computer and underground parking and a corner office. . . . Love to the taxpayer. . . . I’ll never be under OIG investigation.” At the show, the singer was made Commissioner for a Day. “The hotel would like to talk to you about paying for the party that was held in the commissioner’s suite last night” the emcee said. It got a big laugh.

GSA's Jeff Neely Under Fire For Treating Taxpayer Money Like....His PLAY Money.

On the “red carpet” leading into the event, GSA chief Jeffrey Neely said: “I am wearing an Armani.” One worker said, “I have a talent for drinking Margarita. . . . It all began with the introduction of performance measures.” That got a big laugh too.

Their leaders didn’t even pretend to have a sense of mission and responsibility. They reminded me of the story a year ago of the dizzy captain of a U.S. Navy ship who made off-color videos and played them for his crew. He wasn’t interested in the burdens of leadership—the need to be the adult, the uncool one, the one who maintains standards. No one at GSA seemed interested in playing the part of the grown-up, either.

Why? Why did they think this is OK? They seemed mildly decadent. Or proudly decadent. In contrast to you, low, toiling taxpayer that you are, poor drudges and drones.”

Noonan has THAT right.  The taxpayer is viewed today as the “drones.”  We are the last priority, and the first to be robbed of what little we have.

Time for women in the country to demand higher ethics in public office?

THAT’s why The Kitchen Cabinet has established that very principle as one of our missions.  If the nation’s leaders are not exemplifying integrity as they do the People’s business, permission seems given for an absence of integrity…everywhere.

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics, Uncategorized by Sonja Eddings Brown, Apr 20, 2012