The American Spectator

And now, without any embarrassment, the failures at the CIA are engaged in a campaign of malice against the Bush Administration and therefore against the country. The Bush Administration was reelected in an election that featured the Iraq War as a central argument. The people have spoken.

p>I cannot understand how an employee at the CIA, if fired for cause, gets to retain their pension, even if they are only one day away from qualifying for it. Out. And call the Justice Department. br> — Greg Richards /p>

Wow! Jed Babbin’s column about the Praetorians in the CIA is a frightening one. The merging of CIA anti-Americans with media anti-Americans sends shivers down my spine. Both groups’ holier-than-thou attitudes, pretending that they know what’s best for us and that they can do no wrong, puts our country at great risk. Of course, we must understand that they only define patriotism differently. Orwell must be rolling over in his grave. His definition of doublethink comes to mind: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” How could one believe he is doing patriotic things when in actuality he is undermining the security of the nation? Orwell again: “(Doublethink) to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”

Thus we get the media obsession with the “outing” of Valerie Plame at the same time they shrug their shoulders when the N.Y. Times and the Washington Post actually put the country and its heroes in grave danger.

We are in perilous times, and in times of peril we need clarity in our speaking and in our thinking. I’m grateful to find such clarity in Jed Babbin and The American Spectator.

I’ll close with two more Orwell quotes, food for thought: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

p>”So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” br> — Deborah Durkee br> Marietta, Georgia /p> p> The CIA should be dismantled, reconfigured, and rebuilt. The massive 40 billion dollar organization is a poster child for what is wrong with big government. As Jed pointed out in his article, the CIA hasn’t had any major success in 43 years. Most recently, it failed utterly in predicting the fall of the Evil Empire; the CIA also was surprised as anyone by Saddam’s WMD weapons in 1991. Perhaps its biggest failure had to do with AQ Khan, the Taliban, and Bin Laden. Mid East weapons proliferation and a world wide terror network were able to occur right under the CIA’s nose. Yes, the CIA was able to foil the Millennium Threat, but that was pure luck. They had no agents in Afghanistan —during the post 911 Afghan invasion, Green Berets had to build their own network and agents — or in Iraq (we had no idea what kind of WMD program Saddam had in 2002). How this worthless agency survives is a testament to their mastery of the Beltway Game; and survival seems to be the only game they are good at.