Monday, August 20, 2018

Musings from the Big Top

     Recently there's been even more disturbances on the circus stage we know as Washington DC.
The latest big buzz is about how the former director of the CIA is experiencing "repression of his free speech rights" by having had (long overdue) his security clearance pulled. Well, it is a security clearance, his still free to spread his blather, just cannot do so from that point of privilege. What is so wrong with that? The privilege of a security clearance is not the same as a right.
       Now, it used to be, once upon a time, (about the same time John Brennan voted for the head of the Communist Party USA for president), that Democrats were the leading and fiercest critics of the CIA. Ah, but now that he's had his security clearance taken away, he's their latest martyr in the grand slaughter which has accompanied President Stumpy's great stumble into the driver's seat of the ship of state. No, now they're all quite upset Mr Brennan cannot use what he learns from available secrets to make his comments and drive his continued attempts to help create an authoritarian state in the US. Of course, if that's what he'd like, we've got an authoritarian at the helm now, but then for the last eighteen years we've had something of the same thing going on, just trading places. He just wants one that will pay him better, (politics and prostitution being somewhat kin to each other in their methodologies.)
     In a world where both political parties have major blood on their hands, they are both reduced to finger painting with the sanguine knowledge that, if I'm as bad as you are, then I'm OK, and you're just sick, bro. {And I guess by extension they were also all OK with his spying on members of Congress, and Obama's drone assassination program, etc etc et al}
     Of course for Democrats,when the Republicans run the CIA, it's evil, but when the Democrats do, it isn't. This is bullshit too. The entire beast must be deconstructed and slate wiped clean if we are to regain the control of our government to the People and not these various cabals, composed of various members of both parties, which have turned our country into something like a simmering caldron of civil war inspiring grievances. And it will only get worse.
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    But hey -what a great country America is, where even a boy who votes for a Communist for president can grow up to become Director of the CIA!
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      Americans should be (but they do not seem to be) outraged that an American war profiteer, Lockheed Martin, built the missile that slammed into a Yemeni school bus and killed 49 obvious enemies of the Saudi Arabian state. Nope, it's just business as usual for Lockheed Martin, for the various folks who signed off on the deal to ship these weapons to the Saudis, and those who work for Lockheed Martin, sleeping comfortably in their American homes, where bombs will most likely never fall on a school bus carrying their kids to school. That's our tax dollars at work bro. Are you still OK with this? I haven't seen much evidence yet to the contrary. Americans just love their bombs, doesn't natter who is using them, is the only conclusion one can take.
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It's also sad when you see people who you consider longtime friends to be taking sides in this entire thing based on their political allegiances and not critical thinking, and drawing the conclusion that if you hold a position in any way contrary to their own, then you are A) a Stumpy supporter or B) a Stumpy-hater.  (If you are not for A, then you must be for B, and vice versa!) Actually you can be Stumpy-indifferent, which I still am. Presidents do not impress me, even boorish real estate guys that get there by appealing to the lowest common denominator of  public thought. And neither do any presidents intimidate me, not even Obama with his "collect it all" NSA and his "indefinite detention privileges." The only answer I can draw from the whole "Russiagate" farce is that there's a lot of KoolAid drinkers out there. It doesn't matter who mixes it- the poison is still central to the brew.
To sip from the chalice of American politics is to slip into the deep well of Alice's Wonderland, for reals.