THE GORDIAN KNOT WAS NOTHING TO THIS -- Just A Minute Radio for Thursday 120531

Today we do a mini-expose’ of what the President does all the time to make himself into the figure *he wants to be.*

But as often happens things don’t work out that way and we have to take a back seat to reality.

That’s what I hope is happening along these byways and pathways. I think the evidence is pretty clear – but then I’m neither the detective nor the chief. We just keep sort of ‘trudging’ along as the script says and doing our part. Which we think will become reality before too long – say six days into the sixth month after this one. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt isn’t it. Or maybe a little more boring.

I don’t want to be a wet blanket when all the other *young* people are having so much to think about and talk about as we’re entering the summer season. After Memorial Day – summer is *definitely* here in the State of South Carolina. Tend to your garden. Cut the grass. Go on vacation. Play in the creek. Don’t get a sunburn. Read that book, or those books you promised yourself you read for sure this summer. I’ve got mine right beside my easy chair where I can read (if I can overcome the urge to nap as I didn’t today), and do the things that need to get done before the summer is over. That’s one thing about it… you hardly get started on it till it’s over – so enjoy it when it’s here.

One of the things I remember – well actually TWO of the things I remember when we came south from Virginia in the heat of summer. If it was middle of the season I remember peaches and usually grapes – though sometimes they were too green. The Muscatine’s were the things I really remember as lovely and sweet to eat – along with certain free-stone peaches. And there were times when the local kids had to go back to school in the Summer –because they’d been out for hoeing or weeding or something – and they were going to have to go back to school but not until another break came along – and after that break they’d be getting back to school when the cotton pikin’ and ginnin’ had to get finished. I wasn’t around at that time..back in VA we were back in school for good.

My grandmothers were excellent gardeners. Why wouldn’t they be -- they had excellent mule drivers that did the plowing and hoeing and other stuff that was too much like farming. Anyway they knew my brother and I both liked to play in the barn and to eat sugar cookies like she baked. But on Sunday afternoons we generally had a seed spittin’ contest when we cut the watermelons. That usually had to be in August before they came in. By then the peaches were pretty much gone. But we had done some canning – wonder why they called putting the peaches in the glass jars ‘canning’ – I guess nobody took ‘glassin’ to be the right word for the deed. And there were lots of other things to be ‘put by’ – peanuts to dray out or roast – but we burned them too often. Well… better quit goin’ down that road.

I do remember a screech owl that woke me up one night – I thought a woman was getting murdered… I can still hear the screeches. Nobody was alarmed but me I guess.

Well… like I say – summer is here enjoy it.. don’t stand under a tree when it’s lightning… bad news. And the red clay roads in Greenville County – with its hills – would just as readily put you in the ditch as ice or snow would in the winter. You didn’t want to drive on a freshly ‘scraped’ road after a rain… you’d get dirty and in the ditch for sure… abandon all thoughts of a trip if the shower came too soon after a scraping.

Enough of the old days.. Mr. Obama isn’t old enough to remember red clay roads – they probably didn’t have any in Hawaii… or ?? where-ever.

See you tomorrow.

Cordially, IN HIM

Jack

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“JUST A MINUTE”

THE GORDIAN KNOT WAS NOTHING TO THIS

Just a Minute: Shortly after being sworn in as President 2009 Mr. Obama by executive order (EO) created a National Declassification Center (NDC) to review all 400 million pages stored in the National Archives by December 31, 2013. He said he’d make his Presidency the most *transparent* in history.

Anyway -- three years later, just 22 million pages (5.8 %) have been made available to researchers. Despite his call for a streamlining of the declassification process at the NDC, the languid pace of “declassification-as-usual” process trudges along. It would require something over 100 years to process even if you weren’t adding hundreds of thousands more pages every year – you’d never catch up.

We could have gained a glimpse of what was coming when the President in 2010 with Brazil launched an open government policy and challenged other nations to do the same -- he did it behind closed doors.

It’s a bit hard to convince people you really want transparency when you lock the press out of the room. Think we should have picked up on that? -- <> I’m Jack Buttram. (END)

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