(( I refer to the sinister and spooky spiders of Under the Volcano, Mr. Bones, not by any means those loveable fuzzball caterpillars of Rio Limbaugh. Her Imperial Highness of Pajamastán and Podhoretzia Minor thee know already. As previously, I have decided not to share my pearls with the . . . with the neocomrades. I did, however, attempt to vex ’em with a severely truncated scribble, which appears here between the illustrations. ))
A great many of the intestine divisions of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh are on display here, a great convenience for the student. But she should first of all notice one neo-dog that is NOT barkin’ ’n’ bellowin’, namely Hooverville. That seems reasonable enough, for it is very questionable whether anybody ever got rich (as opposed to powerful) by readin’ other folks’ mail. [1]
The term "blackmail" does come to mind, perhaps by way of "black chamber," but blackmail seems to be entirely a private/secret sector behaviour. Neocomrades of every ilk will be wantin’ to bomb or invasionise some LBW, "lesser breed without," whenever their taxpayer-funded snoopin’s work out, not extort money from their patients or victims.
In theory, a spookmonger could blackmail for her country, extortin’ the international equivalent of washing behind the ears: "If M. de Sarkozy at Paris and Gospodin von Liebermann at Tel Avîv do not want certain curious pictures that have come into my possession released to the press, let them modify their régimes’ policies as outlined in Addendumb B before 15 May 2009 at latest! (Signed) Liza of Langley"
That plan was fun to invent and would be more fun to elaborate, and as the fantastic off-hand examples suggest, vulnerable patients or victims would be easy enough to find. Oddly enough, nobody in the Old Euro tradition of war and diplomacy comes to mind at once as having done anything the least bit like it. The Richelieus and Talleyrands and Bismarks and Cavours (plus closer to home even Herr Staatsekretär von Kissinger of H*rv*rd and MEGOP, the "militant extremist Republican Party") have much preferred a quite different scheme, indeed almost the diametrically opposite scheme. They have traditionally paid pensions to the Sarkozy/Liebermann class of victims or patients in hopeful expectation, usually disappointed, that the recipients of their bounty will STAY bought.
Worse, such pensions have often been both political rather than pecuniary and openly disclosed rather than classified, in which case they are pretty much what our neodogs like to bark-’n’-bellow against as ‘appeasement’. Under George XLIII the Old Euro practice was curtailed, downgraded from the Kissingerian level to that nifty Bribe-a-Tribe™ program to reinforce feudal and other retrograde social elements amongst the subjects of the Postinternational Zone Neorégime in the former al-‘Iráq. BaT™ was OK, but it would not have met with the approval of Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology to make substantive political concessions to poor M. al-Málikí at New Baghdád instead of to Shaykh Ibn Fulán out in the boondocks somewhere.
In any case, the main thrust of ‘intelligence’ in MEGOP colonial and imperial administration, even at the village level, has run to bombs rather than bribes. Native A drops a dime on Native B not because she expects a check from the paleface aliens, but because she would like to see that ratfink B kidnapped and locked in a cage. Or, if possible, worse.
Likewise, MEGOP spook groupies are far indeed from wishin’ to collect the sort of intelligence that would conduce to so-called "nation building," a concept so distressin’ to the neocomrades that it seems proper to use the non-Party verb inflection for it in all cases. The sort of ‘intelligence‘ that Princess Neoterica and her Commentariat courtiers and her Big Party inferiors generally would like to see centralised at Langley is, for all practical purposes, exclusively military in nature.
Indeed, a quick fix for all those C.I.A. deficiencies that the peanut-gallery contenders have discovered from watchin’ the toob yesterday [2] would be to clean all those unreliable chickenhawks out of the spook coop and let the violence pros have a total monopoly on "central intelligence."
Balance and fairness require somethin’ of that sort, do they not? Of course they do!
Happy days.
___
[1] Palæocomrade H. L. Stimson lived at about the latest possible date (1929) when a MEGOP could still wish wistfully to be gentlemanly or ladylike after the High Sassenach manner. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Chamber
[2] The inferior ranks of neocomradedom seem to be emulatin’ Señorito D. Brooks of the New York Times Company with this sudden surGe of two-bit amateur sociology.
Unlike his wannabe chelas, however, the guru is always too prudent for it to be obvious which gutters he has gone a-fishin’ in. Judicious vagueness decently drapes the whole empirical side of Master Davey's social-scientisin’.
Princess Neoterica is at odds with her own e-peasants over the Central Intelligence Agency in an interesting way. Both take for granted that there is and ought to be a special affinity between spooks and the militant extremist Republican Party. So far, so good for them, but unfortunately the peasant notion of MEGOP diverges from the landlordly notion of MEGOP.
All the neocomrades crave a C.I.A. that looks like Wingnut City. That much goes without sayin’. But what does Wingnut City look like, exactly? Naturally its appearance depends which side of the tracks the viewer lives on. Wingnut City is, for all practicin’ wingnutettes and wingnuts, "people like us" -- a sub-par political notion that has caused difficulties for the American Democracy as well on occasion.
For the Otherparty, though, the stakes are higher, because, as Signore Barone pointed out the other day, the MEGOP hordes must not merely be people like themselves, they must be ‘normal’ people like themselves. A fallacy of composition arises at once: very few (statistically) normal people live on both sides of the railroad tracks at once. The Fabulous Flyboy of AZ, with his wife's half dozen houses, can presumably pull the stunt off, but in this, as in more important respects, he is sui generis. Anyway, to admit J. Sidney McCain as canonical on this point would be to award the golden apple of normalcy to the landlordly classes and banish the peasants to outer darkness: anybody who can afford to keep up property on both sides of the tracks is eo ipso an Upper.
Princess Neoterica (and presumably JSM) yearn for a C.I.A. that looks like the upmarket side of the Wingnut City tracks, somethin’ like that "Team B" that Pipes Major was involved in thirty years ago, the crew that got everythin’ about the decadent USSR even wronger than the real pro spooks had managed to.
To impugn the potential technical competence of landlordly neoreaction would be beside the point, however. Our issue is what the C.I.A. ought to look like, not how well it is to function.
In the fashionable parts of town, up Herrnstein-Murray Hill in the immediate shadow of Castle Podhóretz, "normal people like us" implies a C.I.A. run by Pipes Major clones, H*rv*rds or at least Ivy-Leaguers -- the scum from the top of Mr. Harvey Mansfield's pond, as it were.
Across town, and out in beautiful suburban Rio Limbaugh, "normal people like us" means, roughly, Fordhams rather than H*rv*rds.
I borrow ‘Fordham’ from the accounts of a previous fit of MEGOP distemper, that of the late 1940's and early 1950's, when the C.I.A. and most of the other alphabet soup agencies were run by the likes of Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss. Fortunately for Wingnut City, if not necessarily for the Republic, there were J. Edgar Hoover and Senator McWhoziz of Wisconsin to keep everybody snooty in line. [2]
Spookery is only a small department of raison d’état, though naturally one of supreme interest to the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers, the landlord-class neocomrades of the strict observance for whom international or intergalactic libido dominandi always comes first. The e-peasantry are more interested in runnin’ the holy Homeland™ itself, or rather, in gettin’ somebody they feel comfy with back into the White House to run it nominally on their behalf. Logically, then, they ought to defer to Her Imperial Highness about the C.I.A. but insist on havin’ somebody more sarahapalingesque run the F.B.I.
Quite illogically and unnaturally, however -- and certainly ‘abnormally’ in Baron Michael’s sense -- no neocomrade of any sort is in a position control the pertinent appointments at the moment. "Life is unfair." [3]
Happy days.
___
[1] abest
[2] Oddly, the learnèd wikipaediatricians don't mention where either of these grand old Heroes of Terror obtained his undergraduate degree. I daresay ‘Fordham’ was a private bee under the commentator's bonnet eons ago when I first heard the funny.
[3] In a Big Party so devoted to the proposition that "History is bunk!" there can not have been many who have reflected how much less unfair Life would seem to them in 2009 if they still possesed some facsimile of Director Hoover, some invisible hand workin’ diligently behind the scenes in Beltway City DC towards the ultimate triumph of illiberalism and antidemocracy and other common Wingnut City values agreed to on both sides of the railroad tracks.
Indeed, I just thought of this slightly subtle, because negative, point myself. It cheers me up not a little to have done so.
Combining the absence of J. Edgar (by death) with the absence of old-fashioned Dixiecrats in Congress (because neocarpetbaggers and neoscalawags hold all those seats now), the student will notice that nowadays there remain pretty well no "eternal Powers, not themselves, that make for righteousness" as Wingnut City conceives political righteousness.
On the other hand there is MurdochNews, but that is at least an open enemy:
"Oh king! Oh father! hear my humble prayer:
Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore;
Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more:
If Greece must perish, we thy will obey,
But let us perish in the face of day!"
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