When politicians take taxpayer dollars for themselves, they have to answer questions about it
MINOT, N.D. — When is a question an attack?
When the politician it’s asked of doesn’t want to answer it.
So it goes with Rep. Rick Becker, a self-described “rising national star of the freedom movement” (stop laughing) who took a quarter-million in taxpayer-backed Paycheck Protection Program loans and now doesn’t want to talk about them.
Yesterday I wrote about Becker ignoring multiple inquiries about these loans — have they been paid back? have they been forgiven? — in the context of his decision to sell some of his businesses. In response, Becker wrote a column for the Dickinson Press that was prompted by “strident attacks on me for taking PPP loans for my businesses.”
Becker expends a great deal of tedious prose in that column on his way to not answering the questions about his loans. His intent was not informing the public, including his constituents in his Bismarck-area district, as to the specifics of the money he took from them, but rather a crude exercise in playing the victim card.
Poor Rick Becker, who took a heaping helping of other people’s money, now is asked to answer a couple of perfectly reasonable questions about it.
What a tragedy.
