Today, the CIA is recruiting and hiring “cis-gender millennials who [have] been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder” — not exactly James Bonds. But perhaps the modern-day fictional James Bond is Guillaume “Malotru” Debailly, the fictional spy on the French series “The Bureau.” By the end of the series, he has betrayed just about everyone he ever worked for. Not out of venality and maybe not out of psychopathology — he always has “good” motives — but the habits of deception run deep and are hard to shake.

Yes, Gus Hall wasn’t any kind of dynamic voice for change. He was the American face of the stagnation of the Brezhnev era.

“It’s not as though the 1976 election lacked for people to vote for if a protest needed to be lodged.”

There were even others. Peter Camajo of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Margaret Wright of the People’s Party (her VP was Dr. Benjamin Spock, the 1972 presidential candidate). Lester Maddox of the American Independent Party. Thomas Anderson (John Schmitz’s 1972 running mate) of the American Party. Lyndon Larouche of US Labor.

I was tempted to vote for Eugene McCarthy. Ford was too bland, too unappealing, and far from the best president. Carter (like Clinton in 1992) struck me as being strange and a con man. Voting for McCarthy had been the cool thing to do 8 years before when I was too young to vote. And he had an interesting mix of ideas, some of them holdovers from his young days on the (Catholic and non-Communist) left, some of them the standard Democrat ideas of the day, and others surprisingly conservative. For example, McCarthy (and Richard Lamm) were sounding the alarm on immigration when Republicans were complacent.
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With the recent revelations from Taibbi and Shellenberger, talk radio has put another former CIA director (actually acting director) in the spotlight: John E. McLaughlin with his 2019 “Thank God for the ‘deep state’” comment. McLaughlin went on:

“Everyone here has seen this progression of diplomats and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now and saying these are people who are doing their duty, who are responding to a higher call. With all of the people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something about it, which was the trigger that unleashed everything else.”

The CIA truly is a state within the state.
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But the story about Brennan’s conversion to Islam is most likely a rumor concocted by a dissatisfied CIA employee. Brennan praised the Hajj and the glories of Mecca, and only Muslims are allowed in Mecca, so the conclusion was that he had become a Muslim and gone to Mecca, but Brennan didn’t actually say that he had been to Mecca himself.

On the other hand, the guy who could vote for Gus Hall and then go on to become CIA director and lie about Hunter Biden is probably capable of anything, so maybe he sees Islam as a way of shaking things up here.