Uncle Charley As Inspector General

Charley sat down beside me on the park bench and sighed.

"Oh, hello, Charley," I said. "You look troubled."

"Well, I am, I am. I been reading the newspapers again, and that always gets me upset."

"Don't like all the car wrecks and tragedies?"

"Nah, that ain't it. That stuff happens, and it ain't really interesting unless you knew the people involved. It's the politicians. They just frost my butt."

I laughed. "They frost everybody's butt. Haven't you got used to them yet?"

"Nope. And it ain't even their dumb votes or bad economics. It's the out-and-out dishonesty, crookedness, graft, whatever you wanta call it."

"Always been there," I pointed out.

"It's always been there because unless they do something really stupid and get caught at it, we don't really give a damn. God knows they got a tough job to do, I give 'em that. But I'm real fed up with them getting their noses too deep in the feed trough."

"We catch them and put them in jail, at least some of the time," I said, sipping from my paper cup of coffee.

"Not nearly enough. I got this thought, though..."

"What's that, Charley?" I laughed.

"I want to be the Inspector General of the U S of A. I want to have a staff of secret police whose only job is to find graft and dishonesty among our elected crooks. And I want there to be public trials for clear-cut cases of dishonesty. Just going to jail ain't enough, not when you defraud near 300 million people. I want to make it plum unpopular to be a crooked politician".

"That's a lot of power. What's to keep you from becoming a crook?"

"You got a point, kid. I'm thinking there ought to be a fairly short time limit on my term as Inspector General. Like maybe one year. I think I could hold out against corruption and sin about that long."

"With that kind of power, there ought to be some real checks and balances," I said. "Who watches the watchers?"

"I read that somewhere too," he grinned. "I reckon the Attorney General could supervise my ethics, but not my job as IG. See, he could make sure I wasn't getting crooked, but he's another politician, and he shouldn't be able to tell me who I could or couldn't go after."

"That makes sense", I commented. "What would you do with the crooked politicians you caught?"

"Anything from public floggings on national television up to life in prison, and I don't mean no Federal country club. I want people to see justice being done. And not only the bad guys get punished, but they or their estates gotta pay back every damn penny."

"Just don't expect any favors your own self," he added, looking stern.

"OK," I said. "I wouldn't expect it".