I don’t explicitly trust Okubo. She has clearly not been forthright when she should or could have been. However, she is the official spokesperson. So her statements do carry some amount of weight.
Regarding your research butter, the time that I put into conversing with you and asking for clarification should show you that I am trying to verify your work for my own satisfaction. I don’t often do that. Most of the time, I just correct errant information and move on.
IMO your work has a lot of speculation in it. And some of it is probably spot on, but some of it needs concrete evidence in order for me to verify it. I trust but verify. That’s who I am. It doesn’t say anything about you. It says something about what level of verification I need in order to accept your conclusions.
I appreciate that and don’t expect or ask you to change that for me or anybody else.
What I would say regarding Okubo’s statements carrying weight because she is the official spokesman is that her statements have so many inconsistencies that if she was put on the stand nobody in the courtroom would consider her a credible witness. So why does her being a government employee make her MORE credible?
The thing I have seen to an excruciating extent is that I could expect a bum off the street to be more honest with me than I have found anybody but a few rare exceptions to be in these government agencies. We are screwed if we have to believe people who break rules and laws as easily as they breathe.
You might say that’s a generalization and presumption. Maybe it is. But I say that after literally thousands of hours digging up proof in order to sort out every little dribble that poops out of Okubo’s mouth (or wherever it drips from). She can say one little drip and I have to spend hundreds of hours sorting out whether or not she’s pulling crap out of thin air - and ultimately find out that she’s full of BS.
But at the end of the day the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on every stinkin’ thing she says means nothing because she has a “Communications Director” title attached to her drivel-filled e-mails.
I don’t intend to whine; it’s my choice to do this. It’s just hard to bite the bullet when I know the extent of the runaround that I’ve been given and the ways that the laws and rules are being broken and/or obfuscated and realize that because I’m a peon I will never be able to overcome the automatic prejudice in favor of a government employee.
I’ve seen the polls where most people would trust a random drawing of names from the phone book more than they would trust Congress. A random person has less motive to lie. The people who answer the poll that way understand the current government, media, and law enforcement landscape really well. I’ve learned that the hard way. A year ago I didn’t think any government worker would have the audacity to tell an outright lie. Let’s just say I had a steep learning curve and I’ve learned my lesson well by now.