Try to do the right thing. Even if it means voting Communist.
I would have thought Comey would have been the first to jump on this with some faux profound statement under a picture of himself looking at a tree or something.
FOAF beat me to it.
What amazes me is even though the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this fall, how the Cold War keeps coming up. Like a former head of the CIA that once voted Commie.
The CIA’s hiring him in the first place is one of the best arguments I have seen for disbanding the CIA.
Tailor-made for John Brennan”
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
Whoever said it first, I leave to the experts.
Brennan will be living in Cuba or Iran within a year.
Brennan may want to retain MIchael Avenatti to represent him in a defamation suit.
John is the Julie Swetnick of the Intelligence community.
“Methinks he protesteth too much.”
For how many years has their side of the argument been relying on a tag team of John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart? Would Mr. Brennan like to see what comes over our Facebook wall from the partisan Democrats in our circle?
As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?
If you ever wanted indicators of something seriously wrong with the system, here they are.
What Snow said.
Wow, what everyone said.
“How is it,” etc.?
Americans, our fellow citizens, in large numbers elected Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. That’s how.
We’re then left to ponder on “why?”.
And arrive at a combination of social guilt-trip and Obama’s great talents as a con artist. Predominantly, albeit not wholly the answer, I think.
As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?
Lynch went back and forth between the US Attorney’s offices and lucrative private practice, moving more laterally than vertically. It would be my default assumption that anyone in the post-Dukakis Democratic Party who lands a position as a U.S. Attorney is a lawfare artist on behalf of the Democratic Party and will hire with that goal. Later efforts by Republicans to clean out the dreck will, of course, be met with nasty little news stories in the Sulzberger and BezosBirdcage Liners (as they were in the Graham Birdcage Liner) as the Democratic Party operatives are wasted.
Comey is a Justice Department lifer (who also got baffling gigs in the financial sector). If my brother’s experience in the federal civil service is instructive and true, the professionals hit a ceiling and thereafter are forever reporting to people who are political animals. (In his case, the political animals are MDs, all of whom are assholes).
Brennan is an intelligence community lifer. Supposedly, he has some rare language skills. Per Reuel Marc Gerecht, promotion within the CIA is governed by how many assets you develop, with the utility of the information you acquire not evaluated. One of the men who served on a special advisory committee for Wm. J. Casey during the Reagan Administration gave an address at Hillsdale some years back in which he explained what Casey (an OSS veteran) was after: alternative perspectives. What this man said was that CIA employees seldom read anything more demanding than The Washington Post, figuring they get all the information they need from their off-the-books sources. We also have reason to believe they recruit screwballs and mediocrities. Aldrich Ames, Valerie Plame, Michael Scheuer, and Philip Giraldi were all employed by the CIA (or, at least, claim they were). See Morton Kondracke’s travelogue on the clandestine services employees he met in Central America in 1988.
Clapper is the real puzzle.
We’re then left to ponder on “why?”.
About 40% of the voting public will not cast a ballot for a Republican no matter who the Democratic candidate is. Among voters with a more fluid disposition, the Republican brand was damaged by mismanagement of the war effort, the developing financial crisis, and media chicanery. The Republican campaign was run by a pair of grifters reporting to a suboptimal candidate.
The real question (and one you see in spades this year) is how and why the peer-review function in the Democratic Party broke down so thoroughly. Geraldine Ferraro and Bill Clinton called attention to this. The professional screens you had to pass through to be a competitive presidential candidate in the Democratic Party prior to 2006 were less than optimal, but there were actual screens. With Obama, you got spam-in-a-can marketed by David Plouffe. John Kerry had punched his ticket for 20 years and run a mess of congressional inquiries, Al Gore had been a federal official of sorts for 20-odd years and was a serious policy wonk, Bilge Clinton had been a state governor for over a decade, Michael Dukakis had been a state governor for a decade, Walter Mondale had 16 years as a federal official and 4 years as a state attorney-general under his belt, Jimmy Carter had been a state governor, agribusinessman, and naval engineer; George McGovern had had > a decade in Congress, a stint as a federal bureau chief, and a bloc of years as a full-time college professor; Hubert Humphrey had had 19 years as a federal official, executive experience as Mayor of Minneapolis, and had worked as a college teacher and pharmacist; Lyndon Johnson had nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill (and a stint as a federal bureau chief); John Kennedy had a decade and a half in Congress and was a combat veteran. Obama was simply NOT a peer of these men.
Ha ha ha.
sdferr–I have to believe that, had Obama’s true history and the influences on him had been fully and accurately reported, and their implications widely known and recognized, Obama would never have had a chance of being elected.
But, the reason why Obama was ever elected to office is that he and/or whoever was working with him created what in the intelligence field is termed a “legend,” a phony biography–a facade as phony as a patched up, painted over, one sheet of plywood thick movie set, a soft focus, false depiction of Obama’s life and background, of who the major influences on his life had been and what they stood for, of what his “accomplishments” had been, what his qualifications for the job were, what Obama believed in, in essence, who Obama was–and the MSM ignored Obama’s actual history, background, associates, and record and, instead, very deliberately “reported” things as if Obama’s “legend,” that phony movie set, was, in fact, the truth.
Any information that contradicted Obama’s “legend” was either never actually investigated, not reported, or immediately ridiculed and dismissed.
Anyone who presented information that contradicted that legend was immediately labeled as a “racist,” a “hater,” a “conspiracy theorist,” you name it.
And the MSM also gave Obama the incalculable help of whipping up a frenzy of unthinking adulation, as if Obama–touted as the “Light Bringer”–was almost a God.
And that’s how and why Obama got elected and re-elected.
Cont’d –Just think, for a moment, about the seemingly profound, but incredibly meretricious and vacuous slogans of the Obama campaign.
To pick three of the most prominent of them—-“Hope and Change,” “Yes We Can,” and “We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For.”
Picture in your mind, as well, those phony Greek columns they used as the background for one of Obama’s major campaign rallies.
Obama’s campaign was truly filled with quite effective propaganda.
As you may see through reflection on my comment above I believe Shelby Steele had both Obama’s measure as well as that of the condition of the Americans who were susceptible to the psychology Obama had learned to effectively apply to them. This, I continue to believe, was the nub of the thing. More is gloss, which apart from befogging the issue, doesn’t point to the story, or problem, if problem this condition may be considered to be.
There is no ‘phony biography’ of Obama. Just a lack of due diligence on the part of a press corps which functioned as an extension of his campaign PR apparat.
Partisan Democrats can get quite hot-under-the-collar if you recite Obama’s employment history in dry terms. He collected a salary from the University of Chicago for 12 years. He taught a 40%-time schedule, taught boutique courses, and published not one scholarly paper. Pro-rating part-time and seasonal work, he was employed in law offices for < 4 years. He did not obtain an associate's position until two years after he'd completed his law degree and when he did so, it was with a 12-lawyer firm in which he practiced a mix of landlord-tenant and labor law. Pretty meh for someone who cadged a JD degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School. He was reclassified as 'of counsel' in 1996 and was never granted a partnership (allowing his license to lapse in 2002). He was in the legislature for 8 years, but never established himself as a maven in any area of policy. A perfect storm of events humiliated his opponents in 2004, allowing his election to Congress. Prior to 2004, the only competitive election he'd ever faced was his primary challenge to Bobby Rush in 2000 (in which he was shellacked). He spent < 3 years in Congress 'ere running for President. Again, he wasn't anyone's idea of a sage in any way which matters on Capitol Hill.
His grandfather had a chum named Frank Marshall Davis with whom he played checkers and smoked dope. That Davis (who ran a small paper distributorship) had moved out there 25 years earlier as a Longshoreman's union official under Communist direction is a matter of scant significance in Obama's life. Obama was also a member of Michael Harrington's outfit ca. 1985. So was Barbara Ehrenreich, who had a regular column for Time and was a welcome guest on Charlie Rose and it’s antecedents. His association with Jeremiah Wright was far more embarrassing than his association with Harrington.
“As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?” [Snow on Pine @ 9:01]
The answer to that question is Robert Conquest’s third law of politics:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
(p.s. Why has the edit function disappeared?)
Commenter Sundance has done a lot of connecting the dots work about the attempted coup.
He has also very usefully translated the FISA court document discussing NSA contractor surveillance abuses into understandable terms, and he finds evidence that such illegal surveillance actually started way back in 2012.
Take a look, as well, at his explication of just how intrusive such NSA database searches of just Internet activity alone can be–when and what you said, who you said it to and all your correspondents, your GPS location, etc., and that even more information can be extracted from such searches.
I thought Brennan, Clapper, and St. Comey we’re doing the right things for the U.S.A. They should be proud to have everything they’ve done released to the public.
“Obama was simply NOT a peer of these men.” – Art Deco.
For which we should be grateful.
Imagine how much more damage he could have done if he had been their peer.
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Try to do the right thing. Even if it means voting Communist.
I would have thought Comey would have been the first to jump on this with some faux profound statement under a picture of himself looking at a tree or something.
FOAF beat me to it.
What amazes me is even though the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago this fall, how the Cold War keeps coming up. Like a former head of the CIA that once voted Commie.
The CIA’s hiring him in the first place is one of the best arguments I have seen for disbanding the CIA.
Tailor-made for John Brennan”
Whoever said it first, I leave to the experts.
Brennan will be living in Cuba or Iran within a year.
Brennan may want to retain MIchael Avenatti to represent him in a defamation suit.
John is the Julie Swetnick of the Intelligence community.
“Methinks he protesteth too much.”
For how many years has their side of the argument been relying on a tag team of John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart? Would Mr. Brennan like to see what comes over our Facebook wall from the partisan Democrats in our circle?
As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?
If you ever wanted indicators of something seriously wrong with the system, here they are.
What Snow said.
Wow, what everyone said.
“How is it,” etc.?
Americans, our fellow citizens, in large numbers elected Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. That’s how.
We’re then left to ponder on “why?”.
And arrive at a combination of social guilt-trip and Obama’s great talents as a con artist. Predominantly, albeit not wholly the answer, I think.
As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?
Lynch went back and forth between the US Attorney’s offices and lucrative private practice, moving more laterally than vertically. It would be my default assumption that anyone in the post-Dukakis Democratic Party who lands a position as a U.S. Attorney is a lawfare artist on behalf of the Democratic Party and will hire with that goal. Later efforts by Republicans to clean out the dreck will, of course, be met with nasty little news stories in the Sulzberger and Bezos Birdcage Liners (as they were in the Graham Birdcage Liner) as the Democratic Party operatives are wasted.
Comey is a Justice Department lifer (who also got baffling gigs in the financial sector). If my brother’s experience in the federal civil service is instructive and true, the professionals hit a ceiling and thereafter are forever reporting to people who are political animals. (In his case, the political animals are MDs, all of whom are assholes).
Brennan is an intelligence community lifer. Supposedly, he has some rare language skills. Per Reuel Marc Gerecht, promotion within the CIA is governed by how many assets you develop, with the utility of the information you acquire not evaluated. One of the men who served on a special advisory committee for Wm. J. Casey during the Reagan Administration gave an address at Hillsdale some years back in which he explained what Casey (an OSS veteran) was after: alternative perspectives. What this man said was that CIA employees seldom read anything more demanding than The Washington Post, figuring they get all the information they need from their off-the-books sources. We also have reason to believe they recruit screwballs and mediocrities. Aldrich Ames, Valerie Plame, Michael Scheuer, and Philip Giraldi were all employed by the CIA (or, at least, claim they were). See Morton Kondracke’s travelogue on the clandestine services employees he met in Central America in 1988.
Clapper is the real puzzle.
We’re then left to ponder on “why?”.
About 40% of the voting public will not cast a ballot for a Republican no matter who the Democratic candidate is. Among voters with a more fluid disposition, the Republican brand was damaged by mismanagement of the war effort, the developing financial crisis, and media chicanery. The Republican campaign was run by a pair of grifters reporting to a suboptimal candidate.
The real question (and one you see in spades this year) is how and why the peer-review function in the Democratic Party broke down so thoroughly. Geraldine Ferraro and Bill Clinton called attention to this. The professional screens you had to pass through to be a competitive presidential candidate in the Democratic Party prior to 2006 were less than optimal, but there were actual screens. With Obama, you got spam-in-a-can marketed by David Plouffe. John Kerry had punched his ticket for 20 years and run a mess of congressional inquiries, Al Gore had been a federal official of sorts for 20-odd years and was a serious policy wonk, Bilge Clinton had been a state governor for over a decade, Michael Dukakis had been a state governor for a decade, Walter Mondale had 16 years as a federal official and 4 years as a state attorney-general under his belt, Jimmy Carter had been a state governor, agribusinessman, and naval engineer; George McGovern had had > a decade in Congress, a stint as a federal bureau chief, and a bloc of years as a full-time college professor; Hubert Humphrey had had 19 years as a federal official, executive experience as Mayor of Minneapolis, and had worked as a college teacher and pharmacist; Lyndon Johnson had nearly 30 years on Capitol Hill (and a stint as a federal bureau chief); John Kennedy had a decade and a half in Congress and was a combat veteran. Obama was simply NOT a peer of these men.
Ha ha ha.
sdferr–I have to believe that, had Obama’s true history and the influences on him had been fully and accurately reported, and their implications widely known and recognized, Obama would never have had a chance of being elected.
But, the reason why Obama was ever elected to office is that he and/or whoever was working with him created what in the intelligence field is termed a “legend,” a phony biography–a facade as phony as a patched up, painted over, one sheet of plywood thick movie set, a soft focus, false depiction of Obama’s life and background, of who the major influences on his life had been and what they stood for, of what his “accomplishments” had been, what his qualifications for the job were, what Obama believed in, in essence, who Obama was–and the MSM ignored Obama’s actual history, background, associates, and record and, instead, very deliberately “reported” things as if Obama’s “legend,” that phony movie set, was, in fact, the truth.
Any information that contradicted Obama’s “legend” was either never actually investigated, not reported, or immediately ridiculed and dismissed.
Anyone who presented information that contradicted that legend was immediately labeled as a “racist,” a “hater,” a “conspiracy theorist,” you name it.
And the MSM also gave Obama the incalculable help of whipping up a frenzy of unthinking adulation, as if Obama–touted as the “Light Bringer”–was almost a God.
And that’s how and why Obama got elected and re-elected.
Cont’d –Just think, for a moment, about the seemingly profound, but incredibly meretricious and vacuous slogans of the Obama campaign.
To pick three of the most prominent of them—-“Hope and Change,” “Yes We Can,” and “We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For.”
Picture in your mind, as well, those phony Greek columns they used as the background for one of Obama’s major campaign rallies.
Obama’s campaign was truly filled with quite effective propaganda.
As you may see through reflection on my comment above I believe Shelby Steele had both Obama’s measure as well as that of the condition of the Americans who were susceptible to the psychology Obama had learned to effectively apply to them. This, I continue to believe, was the nub of the thing. More is gloss, which apart from befogging the issue, doesn’t point to the story, or problem, if problem this condition may be considered to be.
There is no ‘phony biography’ of Obama. Just a lack of due diligence on the part of a press corps which functioned as an extension of his campaign PR apparat.
Partisan Democrats can get quite hot-under-the-collar if you recite Obama’s employment history in dry terms. He collected a salary from the University of Chicago for 12 years. He taught a 40%-time schedule, taught boutique courses, and published not one scholarly paper. Pro-rating part-time and seasonal work, he was employed in law offices for < 4 years. He did not obtain an associate's position until two years after he'd completed his law degree and when he did so, it was with a 12-lawyer firm in which he practiced a mix of landlord-tenant and labor law. Pretty meh for someone who cadged a JD degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School. He was reclassified as 'of counsel' in 1996 and was never granted a partnership (allowing his license to lapse in 2002). He was in the legislature for 8 years, but never established himself as a maven in any area of policy. A perfect storm of events humiliated his opponents in 2004, allowing his election to Congress. Prior to 2004, the only competitive election he'd ever faced was his primary challenge to Bobby Rush in 2000 (in which he was shellacked). He spent < 3 years in Congress 'ere running for President. Again, he wasn't anyone's idea of a sage in any way which matters on Capitol Hill.
His grandfather had a chum named Frank Marshall Davis with whom he played checkers and smoked dope. That Davis (who ran a small paper distributorship) had moved out there 25 years earlier as a Longshoreman's union official under Communist direction is a matter of scant significance in Obama's life. Obama was also a member of Michael Harrington's outfit ca. 1985. So was Barbara Ehrenreich, who had a regular column for Time and was a welcome guest on Charlie Rose and it’s antecedents. His association with Jeremiah Wright was far more embarrassing than his association with Harrington.
“As I’ve written here before, how is it possible that the likes of this odious crew–Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, etc.–ever rose to such positions of power in the Federal bureaucracy?” [Snow on Pine @ 9:01]
The answer to that question is Robert Conquest’s third law of politics:
(p.s. Why has the edit function disappeared?)
Commenter Sundance has done a lot of connecting the dots work about the attempted coup.
He has also very usefully translated the FISA court document discussing NSA contractor surveillance abuses into understandable terms, and he finds evidence that such illegal surveillance actually started way back in 2012.
Take a look, as well, at his explication of just how intrusive such NSA database searches of just Internet activity alone can be–when and what you said, who you said it to and all your correspondents, your GPS location, etc., and that even more information can be extracted from such searches.
See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/24/evidence-of-obama-administration-political-surveillance-beginning-mid-2012/
I thought Brennan, Clapper, and St. Comey we’re doing the right things for the U.S.A. They should be proud to have everything they’ve done released to the public.
“Obama was simply NOT a peer of these men.” – Art Deco.
For which we should be grateful.
Imagine how much more damage he could have done if he had been their peer.