I am not trustworthy: really???

I wrote rather much about day-to-day political matters last week. Let us work our way out of it. Today I will take up a political matter with an odd philosophical twist. Tomorrow, I'll ask a philosophically freighted question about political history.

To begin with an oddity: the Secretary of Health has now sworn to a very strange account of why he fired a subordinate.

Secy Kennedy says that he asked her, "Are you trustworthy?" and she replied, "No." So he had to fire her.

I'm curious whether anyone in the world believes this story. First: who says in earnest (not by way of posing a hypothetical) that she is "not trustworthy"? Untrustworthy people generally desirous of keeping their jobs seek to pretend to be trustworthy just as liars pretend to be sincere. Saying "I am untrustworthy" seems a very odd way of quitting. Why not just use the old standby, "I quit"?

Anyway, this hypothetical "yes" in response to that question seems very much like a old paradox of the Cretan who said "all Cretans are liars". Or Captain James T. Kirk who, as Star Trek fans know, used a form of the same paradox to blow the fuses of an android.

If she is not trustworthy, then presumably the statement THAT she is not trustworthy is itself untrustworthy. So maybe she is trustworthy after all? Fuses start smoking.

Anyway, since I am not an android I will cease this programming and let my circuits cool down.

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