Is integrity regenerative?

I was thinking about an open letter to Sen. Bond:

“Dear Bond, time to dig out that cloak of integrity – you know the one – the one that allowed people to feel you are a straight shooter?  Maybe it is in the back of the closet all rumpled and just needs some freshening up or maybe it is in the attic and has some mold where you spilled those quail eggs from one of rove’s parties?  Or did you leave it in the garage, maybe on the floor soaking up oil dribblets?”

But then I thought, can you really regenerate integrity?  Or is it like a penis – you have to put it in ice and reattach it rather quickly?  Maybe it is like trust, once broken very hard to regain, but can be regained over a long period of time by acting consistently in a trustful manner?  And what IS the difference between integrity and trust?
We know that integrity is NOT

  1. failing your duty, failing to do due diligence, failing to hold hearings about how the taxpayers’ monies are spent, failing to insure armor and good health care for our troops.
  2. accusing opponents of treason and yet failing to root out treason in the oval office when a CIA agent is outed.
  3. selling out seniors to the drug companies and selling out debtors to the credit card companies and selling out our energy costs and networks to oil companies and selling out our troops to the sub and sub sub contractors of Haliburton and trying to sell out our seniors yet once again the the finance mavens on wall street.
  4. allowing torture, trashing of international treaties, gulags, renditions and generally lack of accountability and law abiding behaviors.
  5. lying, stealing votes, election fraud, selling influence to lobbyists, or projecting one sins upon others.  (And in general just being a f00king hypocrit!)

So how can you clean off that cloak Mr. Bond?  Just brushing it off won’t do it.  It will show all kinds of stains now that we’ve seen some of the things under the rocks where you left it.

Might I suggest a simple step forward?  Just acknowledge that things are not right!  Just acknowledge that there are things to do to set them right!  Acknowledge your part in this war, acknowledge that you’ve helped purchase this blood on all of our hands.  Acknowledge that we have interests in the region and how can we make all of this crap right! Maybe there are some things we cannot really make right at this point and none of us really know everything, but at least ask some f00king hard questions of yourself and everybody else on that ridiculous plot of land in the beltway!