I’m writing for the Washington Monthly again this weekend, so I will save this for tomorrow when I will do a fuller treatment of it.
For now, I just want to note that every member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who is complaining about stonewalling from CIA director John Brennan has a ‘D’ after their name.
What are their names? Chairwomen Diane Feinstein, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan (also the Armed Services chairman), Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado (who renewed his call for Brennan’s resignation), and Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. None of the Republican senators gives a shit that a Democratic president’s Director of Central Intelligence is refusing to tell them who ordered their staff’s computers to be hacked. None of them seem to care that their staffers were wrongly accused of a crime by the CIA. They don’t stick up for their staff. They wanted to deny them health benefits.
Meanwhile, the Democrats (at least, some of them) are fighting their own administration tooth and nail over both this issue and over how much to redact their report on torture. When did Republicans ever do anything like that during the Bush administration?
It’s the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report. The can read the entire unredacted report into the Congressional Record (or only one member can) and have done with Brennan.
I am so damn tired of the story of Democratic helplessness in Congress. Just like the Citizens United vote fiasco. If the press doesn’t report the vote accurately, it doesn’t matter that Republicans blocked another cloture vote. Dems could have moved it to the House for them to shoot down. The money in politics issue has not yet been hung around the neck of the GOP.
And neither will accountability in the national security and intelligence communities. Without some actual Democratic hardball.
And an SSCI investigation of Keith Alexander’s new business offerings is well within order as well.
Who in the White House is keeping Brennan from being cut loose?
Who in the White House is keeping Brennan from being cut loose?
The president himself? They seem to work well together, to the point that he was poised to be nominated, crushed by public and internet outcry to be placed as a senior advisor to the president and then nominated again later.
He trusts Brennan, which is important. See, for example JFK/Allen Dulles or RMN and Dick Helms.
So if Brennan is untrustworthy and the President trusts him, where does that put US foreign policy except in the crapper?
It’s becoming the case that ordinary people are just being played for the ritual effects of a cult and not honest-to-goodness republican government. It’s the sacred mushroom cult of governance. Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit all the time. And when they grow up big and strong anyway, cut them off and can them.
it is important, as more evidence of Obama’s abysmal judgment.
Maybe it’s bad judgment.
Maybe he’s read a history book.
What makes Brennan trustworthy? Nothing as far as I can tell. He should be in handcuffs, and escorted to a prison cell.
Okay, what made Allen Dulles and Dick Helms untrustworthy?
He knows where all the bodies are buried, so to speak.
It’s not that.
Dulles had no personal loyalty to JFK and he set him up with the Bay of Pigs.
Helms let Hunt et. al. run around as free agents, get caught, and ruin Nixon’s presidency.
Brennan won’t willingly do anything like that to Obama, nor will he look the other way if CIA officer begin openly contemplating his assassination, as happened with Dulles.
Brennan will protect Obama as long as Obama protects him.
I think people are just naive about the danger posed to presidents by the rogue elements of the intelligence agencies. It’s especially important that leader of the IC is personally loyal to the administration, and Brennan is.
No one has any difficulty understanding this dynamic in foreign countries but they think our guys are virtuous or something.
Not that our guys are the most virtuous or more virtuous — if by “guys” you mean leaders and PM’s and presidents — but that they’ve a lot more influence and “leader of the free world” is a have your cake and eat it too situation.
I don’t care how naive we are, or how ridiculous our expectations must be. Insubordination and criminal acts are criminal. If the president can’t do what should be done, he shouldn’t have run for president.
Sorry, man, but all I see here is gibberish.
And all I see are excuses for a criminal. But you know, gotta pick your battles.
Kinda makes Truman’s “Poor Ike” statement sound very quaint.
So everybody puts their head down, look like they’re working and punch the clock. Business as usual ad infinitum.
So you’re basically saying the intelligence community runs the show and there’s nothing the president can do about it?
It’s one thing to say everything is political and the president doesn’t have unlimited power or pull and needs allies across the government. It’s another to say that the president is more or less powerless to hold anyone in the intelligence community accountable for any degree of lawbreaking, up to and including lawbreaking that threatens our constitutional order, because someone or some group in that community might kill him.
In other words, it’s one thing to say the president is constrained, even highly constrained. It’s another to say that he serves and even lives at the pleasure of unnamed entities in the intelligence community.
How do you know this, Booman? Are you psychic or do you have inside information that proves it.
You write in your article:
Right. And my answer to you is that the president who appointed Brennan by whose permission Brennan remains atop the CIA…assuming of course he is not just another figurehead/mouthpiece for the real government as is Obama…that president also has a “D” after his name.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a worthless “D.” A “D” that means nothing now, a “D” that has become simply another corporate branding tool.
It also leaves us just where Tarheel says it leaves us. That’s where.
He also says:
And:
But none of these things are going to happen. You know it; I know it; Tarheel knows it; the entire federal government structure knows it and now the American people are beginning to smell the stench coming from this “bipartisan,” “good cop/bad cop,” thoroughly-part-of-a-gigantic-multinational-fix rathole.
And here you are, defending it.
WTFU.
You have either been had, you are a willing, witting part of the fix or some mixture of both.
Any way you cut it, WTFU before it’s too late.
Please.
When this house of cards goes down goes down…and it will, eventually…everybody who was involved in it will go down as well.
How do you think the people who invested with Madoff and the ones who worked for him are doing now?
Not well.
Not well at all.
The people who permitted him to run his game, however? The economic masters of the PermaGov, those who have painstakingly set this system up over the past 50+ years so that rats like Madoff can freely hustle and steal?
Jes’ fine. They’re doing jes’ fine. They throw an occasional rat to the dogs so that the public thinks they’re taking care of business. That are “taking care of business,” of course. It’s just that it’s not quite the business that they would have us believe.
Bet on it.
As above, so below.
Bet on that as well.
When massive national hustle falls…this gigantic criminal conspiracy masquerading as a government…those who supported it and those who were stupid enough to invest in it will fall as well.
WTFU.
AG
Constitutional amendments require a 2/3rds vote.
Then why bother?
Good question. Answer is to put all 45 Republicans on the record as supporting big money in politics.
If no one ever knows what exactly that vote was about, even that is foolish.
It seems that the big strategic decision is whether to let the Republicans campaign in the field enough that the public in their district actually sees who they are or to tie them down in DC with bogus bills that they will never pass and letting them filibuster again and again to show their do-nothing-ness.
By far the best thing to come out individual campaigns so far is the 50 additional votes per precinct tactic. It has the attention of the Georgia Secretary of State, who is likely to do something stupid and be slapped down by the US courts. Welcome to the fight over Jim Crow II. Thanks Zell.
And if we did that, what would it do?
Nothing. Republicans LIKE the big money. Democrats don’t. To the public, it’s partisan.
It’s a dead issue, unless the SC changes.
“It’s a dead issue, unless the SC changes.”
Which could happen very quickly after one of the bare majority of 5 Justices who pushed through the decision retires.
Makes it awfully important to prevent a Republican from taking the Presidency.
Money in politics is not an issue that 90% of the public cares about. That’s why CU is never going anywhere. It’s either change the SC or live with it.
Of course. At least in our state, dataguy, the people know that politics IS money. Who gets the envelope, who set who for the do nothing job, who gets the contract, etc. etc. Not policy.
Round Two:
Your forget that
4, The Republicans are already “measuring the drapes” and mapping out their 2015 Senate agenda, which depends on turncoat behavior by folks like Manchin, Landrieu, and so on. Can’t we have a little party discipline on behalf of the people instead of continual pandering for moneyed interests?
What are their names? Chairwomen Diane Feinstein, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan (also the Armed Services chairman), …
I don’t know about the rest of them but DiFi is certainly playing bad cop, to Obama’s good cop, in this routine. Do you think she wants to be held accountable for what C+ Augustus told her as ranking member from Jan. 2001-Jan. 2007?
The ranking member at that time was Jay Rockefeller.
And he put a letter in a file for future reference.
The economic form of the same powerlessness of the Presidency.
Fed Economists: America’s missing workers are not coming back
Permanent depression and permanent totalitarianism and permanent war. Just get used to the new normal, progressives. You won’t be able to do anything but scream.
The New Bubble
Solution: Debt strike.
The Icelandic solution.
Would net work here. Give money to homeowners instead of bankers? What are you, a Communist? /snark
Strangely enough, I was accused of that very thing by an office supply delivery guy about a year ago, simply because we had a photo of the First Family stuck on the side of a file cabinet in our office. I’m afraid at my advanced age and temperament, I wouldn’t make a very convivial commune dweller. However, I do have some rather strong socialist tendencies…
Political malpractice, Case GA-10-2014:
Paul Broun has no Democratic opposition according to NBC News.
However, it appears that Ken Dious is the Democratic candidate.
A further-out nutcake pastor named Jody Hice is the Republican candidate.
And after losing in the Republican primary for Senator, Paul Broun is not running for anything at all.
Folks who know folks at the University of Georgia should get them working for Dious.
What the Iron Curtain of Rush Limbaugh has done. What the Berlin Wall of GOP Congressional and legislative obstructionism to contain Obama has done. What the tepid responses of Eric Holder and Captain Ron Johnson have done.
After Ferguson, Some Black Academics Wonder: Does Pursuing a Ph.D. Matter?
Kinda the reaction of lots of upwardly mobile middle class kids had in the academic environment of 1968-1970. The elites created the economic climate and employment screening of past activists that made that choice finally irrelevant. Likely the elite are preparing the same fate for these black Ph.D. candidates. Lord knows, the elite is cutting off all the lower rungs of the ladder.