My father spent his working life in federal government for years, and I can vaguely recall a time (gets harder and harder to do that any more) when people gravitated towards the public sector, if you will, because they didn’t necessarily want all kinds of fancy perks that they could get in private life, but instead wanted to make a decent wage with benefits and achieve career civil service status and provide something we used to commonly refer to as constituent service. These people were middle class professionals who honestly tried to make a difference in people’s lives (the sort who were utterly demonized when Reagan and the Repugs began the conservative ascendancy for real in the ‘80s).I started thinking about this after I read this story about Brian J. Doyle, the DHS spokesman arrested on child sex charges.
I am definitely NOT trying to “paint with a broad brush” here. I’m sure there are many, many, MANY fine government employees who go about their jobs then as now, and there have also been “bad apples” all the while as well tossed in from time to time.
However, given all of this, here is my concern (and my hope is that our government has thought of this long before now).
Assuming Doyle had any sensitive information in his head, I hope that he has not been “turned” by someone blackmailing him for information. An unscrupulous individual could have learned about Doyle’s “proclivities” and used them against him to find out information on DHS allocation of manpower, perceived threat areas, bureaucratic problems that could thwart agency effectiveness, etc., basically telling Doyle to provide the information or he would be “outed.”
Also, it is Doyle’s everlasting bad luck that he will be charged in Florida on this. The phrase “far more meaningful and significant” regarding possible sentencing in the event that Doyle is convicted is ominous, though that doesn’t mean that I feel sorry for Doyle in any way.
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