An offer from a former senator and current president of the United States is similar to an offer from a former Senate Majority Leader and current Vice-President of the United States (1961).
In the second case it was an offer that you could not refuse -- and live.. LBJ offered USDA official Henry Marshall promotions to move from Texas to Washington, D.C. USDA HQ.
Mr. Marshall would no longer be going after the criminal wrong-doing of Billie Sol Estes and would exit the superhighway leading to Billie's buddy LBJ.
A short time later Mr. Marshall committed suicide by knocking himself unconscious, managing somehow to breath through a hose attached to the tailpipe of a pickup truck, and -- all else failing -- shot himself several times with a bolt-action rifle. (In the 1980s with new information our rulers said, well maybe it wasn't suicide.)
What about refusing Obama's offers? I guess we won't know. Apparently they were accepted.
BTW, unless memory fails I recall that the federal employees who gave us Ruby Ridge (and Waco maybe) were quietly rewarded with cash and promotions at a ceremony held at Tinker AFB, OK.
The Ruby Ridge sniper that killed Vicky Weaver is still around, I think
I also always wonder what the Secret Service knows about various peccadilloes of Presidents.
Here is a poem I ran across today:
“Waiting for the Barbarians”
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)
- Original Greek Poem