Want an appointment with the new Administration? Here’s the instructions for completing the background information [pdf]. Take a look at Section VIII. Or Section II, Questions 12, 13 and 14.
(Much of this questionnaire applies to non-political, career executive positions too.)
That is one tough questionnaire!
Kind of brings to mind the story of God’s two angels in disguise seeking throughout the city of Sodom for one good man to spare the city from God’s destructive wrath. And even Lot, the one good man they found, offered his two virgin daughters up to the clamoring crowds. (Certainly that kind of behavior would be an embarrassment to the president.)
My family is a constant sourse of embarrassment to me. Where would I even start? I guess I’m out.
A security investigator once asked me if I’d ever done anything I wouldn’t wanr to appear on the front page of The Washington Post. I replied I wouldn’t want my report cards to appear on the front page, but that didn’t mean I’d sell out my country to prevent it.
Security questionnaires are a lot like airport security — theater to reassure everyone.
When the White House contacted a friend to follow up on her questionnaire for a presidential appointment, the White House person asked my friend is she or her immediate family had ever done anything that would embarrass the president.
“Does he embarrass easily?” she asked back.
Having been through the TS/SBI I have few illusions about having ANY privacy, but must admit that my very early youth involved events that were very public. Sort of the “nail that sticks up” theory of life. If you do things in public, you intrinsically give up your right to privacy.
But I am constantly amazed by the number of public officials getting busted for such obvious discrepancies as illegal nannies.
And I was a bit disturbed by the questions on guns. The underlying tone of those questions likens them to dynamite waiting to go off – not a problem for me in 30+ years of gun ownership. But I was raised in a house whose gun attitudes more closely approach Palin’s family than Obama’s.