It depends on what the meaning of ‘loyal Bushies’ is

Speaking of political corruption-

(This is a follow-up on a post on the CIA and the Iraq war from a few weeks ago)

Over the past few years, the CIA has been mentioned in the media much more frequently than it had been before that. Often, as I noted in my previous post, these reports have supplied fodder for the inference that the CIA is a nonpartisan organization- unlike Fox News, many other federal bureaus and regulatory agencies since Bush came to office, and, at least to a lesser degree, probably every other institution in contemporary America- or at least for the inference that it is nonpolitical enough to be professional and competent in the face of a White House and legislative branch that were increasingly exposed as exploiting their powers and responsibilities for selfish political gain, and, unfortunately, for little else. However, for liberals, this description belies what for many of us had been old hat and common sense- prior to 9/11, a well-informed, well-educated liberals could hear the stories of how the CIA was involved in fomenting massacres of innocent civilians in South America, and of how the FBI was extremely racist not very long ago, and how in the COINTELPRO cases (Hobson v. Wilson, etc.) the FBI was found liable for harassing and committing a violation of civil rights violations against activist groups, beyond its legal authority. Today, the FBI are treated as heroes in movies, but not too long ago, in pursuit of racist goals, they were hunting down politically active liberals of any race to harass them and destroy their lives. One has to wonder what kind of people these groups draw their personnel from, and how we know some change has occurred so that the personnel who used to be racist in these groups, are all now somehow replaced, or not racist anymore, so that these groups cannot be using their power anachronistically to promote aims that are contrary to the values of the mainstream of American people today. Common sense, in addition to the anecdotes we’ve heard about the FBI or the CIA, tells us that no kind of people, in any context, are uniformly great. All sorts of institutions have a variety of people working for them, in terms of aptitude and morality, and go through cycles of becoming corrupt and abused. With all the focus on the CIA in the news, one may wonder who are all these people, what are the ways their actions may be reviewed and who reviews them, what really governs them, how can they be fired if individual people with the CIA are capable of doing so much covertly, how they can be trusted not to hire people and assign people to jobs and promote people on illegitimate bases, such as political party affiliation or religion, and how we can be sure their judgment and their methods are competent.

With all the concern over civil liberties since 9/11 happened, it’s natural to wonder who are the people who so badly want to be able to torture suspects in their custody that it becomes a national controversy whether their authority should be enlarged. Especially when a lot of those suspects turn out to be innocent of wrongdoing. When the nation and its police have such a long and recent history of racism, its natural to wonder who are the individuals who will be conducting our War on Terror against Middle Eastern people. It’s natural to want to know whether those people are the kind of people who are into the Christian Identity movement, whether they are the type of people who love irrational conservative talk show hosts. It’s natural knowing the history of secret police to not want crazy individuals who would go beyond their authority or not understand where their authority should end to wield that power. And it especially makes sense in the context of post-9/11 time, when it’s all too easy for people to talk to themselves in language suggesting that now, anything is justified, when we all know that the complicated rules that govern our police and society are in place just to prevent evil abuse and damagins incompetence. Despite all the focus from the media, recently, though, we don’t see much speculation on the CIA, or questioning of their performance or judgment, even though they wield such awesome power.

So the sins of secret police of the past aren’t repeated, it’s natural for the citizens of a nation to take an interest in our intelligence agency not becoming corrupted. I think there are a few reasons to question what we’ve heard about the CIA over the past few years. Specific reasons exist to prompt you to take an interest, even though you may be inclined (incorrectly, as I think I’ve shown) to believe that everyting the CIA does should be the CIA’s business, and no one else should care at all. We know the CIA trained Bin Laden, and we know the CIA has quit looking for him. You’d think they have nothing better to do. Ragardless of how much sense any explanations particular people might guess for this are, it at least leads one to wonder why. But with this CIA, it seems that not only do we not wonder, we’ve cut off our ability not only to ask but to wonder. In any other context, we might ask, how do we know these people are not just a bunch of dopes or have lost their taste for hard work that usually goes with reputation?

But the urban legend about the CIA is that they’ve got the best people working for them, and that they only recruit the best people. Why do we believe the urban legend, when we don’t believe urban legends applied to other groups? As we grow more old and mature, we lose our naivete about all types of people. But the CIA, unlike any other group or person, is uniquely positioned to protect its reputation. No one else can not only say what they want about themselves, but keep what they do otherwise secret.

So once we’ve been prompted to become skeptical again, there are a few things we might be skeptical of that we’ve seen in the media, that go beyond particulars (e.g., Bin Laden) to implicit themes about what the CIA really is. One is that the CIA is not ideological. Another is that you can judge what the CIA is really about from how one spokesman to the media of the CIA, or one press statement, represents the group, or how one ex-CIA operative who discusses the CIA and security matters to the press seems. Another is that the CIA is professional and competent and works within the legitimate limits placed on the organization’s power, and to further any idividual CIA officer’s personal or ideological ends.

As far as being ideological, you should think about what kind of person might want to belong to a secret police organization. What kinds of people have you known that wanted to become regular police? What kinds of people that you knew actually became police? Or became miitary personnel? A lot of us think police stories and war adventures are enthralling growing up. A lot of liberals enjoy movies and books and fiction that center around those kinds of themes, and probably secretly wish or havewished they could do those kinds of things. And the popularity of police and military movies attests to this. But do liberals actually get those jobs? No. It’s much more common for a liberal to grow out of that, to think that other pursuits are a better use of his or her abilities, and if a liberal does join the military, to only use it asa stepping stone to something greater in life. Liberals are not hobby warriors who mentally masturbate themselves to the idea of warfare and controlling people and hurting people, to the idea of humiliating people, and they think that other things are more interesting than fighting. They may think fighting is interesting, but they read books on science, or literature, and so forth, not just books about police and fighting and wars all the time. There’s a reason why police organizations were historically racist. That’s there’s no liberals means that it’s coservatives who are left over.

I don’t mean to imply that police departments are all racist or all full of assholes, and we all have stories of the good cop we’ve met. But I mean to suggest what people tend to do. I think most police departments, if I had to guess, can be described by a three way split. One third of the guys may be real assholes- the guys who harass you when they pull you over, the guys we read about who rape women or run whore houses. One third of the guys may be along for the ride with those guys, and easily talked into what those guys want to do, but in the absence of the worst, wouldn’t exactly be thinking it all up themselves. Then we have the third that are really just along for the ride, and this includes those who are good cops. They may condone what the others do just out of loyalty to fellow cops, even though they knw they’re bad guys, and they may never speak up about the wrong things the others do, even if they may really want to some times. Even many of these may be racist (which partly motivated them to become cops) but in a passive way, not at all like the active way members of the other two thirds may be. Whether one third or another controls a particular police department is going to be a matter of chance and history as regards any particular police department. I do think this is a pretty fair summary of a typical police department, if you wanted to know what I think honestly.

We are in deep shit if the CIA is anything like this, and especially if the bad third is in control of things, as often enough may be the case with municipal, state police departments. With all the right wing yahoos out west, and with the Evangelical co-opting of the Air Force Academy, do you think there are no wackos in the CIA? It might be that a lot of the leadership are like a cross between D-FENS from the movie Falling Down and John Doe from the movie Seven– guys who would love the movie Seven but who would never in a million years see that it’s message is a critique of unbridled law enforcement- that the writer is saying maybe homicide dectectives really should be able to kick down doors without a warrant sometimes, but that Puritan wackos like John Doe don’t realize that what they want is unobtainable and not worth the efforts.

As far as thinking one person you see on tv or one instance of CIA action being reported stands for what the CIA, or people who direct it, are really like, I would just like to remind you that it would be really unlikely if any organization so large contained only people who were birds of a feather. Indeed, the GOP in general contains stooges, people who are useful for stupid work because they are more expendable (i.e., perhaps not ideological, or racist, as others are) and who can rise in the ranks from being lower servants to being greater servants, but can never really make real decisions. That one guy from the CIA decides to write novels and become a concultant on terrorism to the federal government and write other books on learned subject does not represent what other people in the CIA are like. And how many examples of that are there, really?

Going back again to the third assumption- that the CIA is not ideological to the point of doing things they’re not supposed to to pursue goals they’re not supposed to- reminds me of all the criticism of the Iraq war intelligence by the CIA. Surely, the CIA knows what is in it’s interest and knows what’s not, and knows that it is a threat to it if it is seen as doing anything it is not supposed to be doing. Meaning-if you think it’s likely that the CIA knew that endorsing the intelligence the Bush administration was using about weapons to justify the war to the pres would be leaving themselves vulnerable to being caught in a lie to the press that would set to send the American people to war, do you really think the would do it? Secret police that are seen as gestapoes cannot last or thrive. So statements from the agency about what it thinks about something are worthless for telling us what it really thinks, but only definitely useful for telling us how it wants to be perceived. Especially if you are inclined to conclude that CIA people are a lot more likely to be like Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio wackos than other types of people, who would probably enjoy the idea of eliminating people who aren’t white.

Tony Snow is a crack dealer, and he smokes most of his own product, apparently. This is bad for business, but it’s probably the only way he can get through a press conference without having his head explode.

I hope everyone who smells the bullshit he’s peddling remembers which network he crawled out of, and takes that into account whenever they are exposed to the “news” from that anal orifice.

Tony Snow must drink himself to sleep every night.

“If Tony Snow didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him.”

Could you really live with that on your conscience?

The phrase “loyal Bushies” as this Administration uses it is equivalent to what the faith-based call “among the Elect”, “saved”, “believers”, as opposed to “the damned”, the “infidel”. The Jesuits simply refer to “one of Ours”. To the Mafia it’s “La Cosa Nostra” , “our thing”. Gangs call them “homeys”. Eric Hoffer called them “True Believers” – those who have no identity independent from and prior to their membership, utterly incapable of independent thought and judgement as free citizens. All-in-all, it’s a very un-American concept, or at least it used to be.

When did Swan (#3) go off his meds?

What puzzles me about the whole thing — irrespective of who first had the idea of firing all 93 — is this:

Firing all 93 and rehiring the loyal 80% of them might not have been a bad idea from their POV. A 3-card monte, in a way, and in the shuffle, the 20% canned might have been missed. Because, while unusual, it *was* the beginning of the second term, and, on the surface at least, it would have looked like “clean sweep”, “new course”, etc, etc. That’s when Gonzales replaced Ashcroft, too, and nobody thought much about that.

But. It was still *January* of ’05. And the Patriot Act provision letting them keep their replacements indefinitely without Senate confirmation wasn’t slipped in until much later that year. So, how were they planning to conduct that operation?

Libra @15. The patriot act provision took place after it was clear the Dems were going to be in charge of Congress and it was therefore ncessary. If the rubber stamp Repubs were still in charge, it would not be necessary to slip it into legislation. Think of it as a going away gift from the 109th.

I guess the question is why didn’t Rove et al act more quickly in canning the USA’s? If it was meant to be a new start to Bush’s second term, canning them at roughly the halfway point of his second term was sure an odd thing to do … unless it would pay dividends to keeping Repubs in power for the ’08 elections.