The Thing About That Edward Snowden Thing

I'm really glad I'm not the only one thinking this whole fish stinks.

Some passing observations:
1) When everybody's in on the secret, there are no secrets
The number of people with Top Secret Clearance was 850,000 two years ago.

2) It's not what you know or who you know that counts; it's what you know about who you know.
And also too, Little Eddie got his cool job at Booz Allen by being a National Security Legacy Puke (imho) - a kid with a GED and the absolute minimum "experience" just kinda waltzes in?  Either the recruitment standards are total crap or Mommy and Daddy's pals greased the skids; with a side order of paranoia about "anybody from the outside".

3) And all of that generally points to a system where very few people are all that interested in learning any real truth about much of anything because everybody's way more interested in having good compliant little go-bots working diligently to make sure they gather the info necessary to confirm the foregone conclusions of management.

No soul and no honor.  But I'll give Snowden this much:  I think he came to understand that what he was doing wasn't accomplishing anything he was constantly being told it was accomplishing - his recent comment about how he could bring down the entire CIA Field Ops structure makes me think the guy really bought into it, and he's just now trying to come out of it - so "blowing the whistle" is his way of saying he got to the point where he could recognize it as bullshit, and now he's calling it bullshit.  Which is really why he poses such a threat; which in turn is why we get two basic reactions from the power centers in Washington - they either sniff and wave him off as an insignificant little bug, or he's Benedict Arnold times infinity squared.

Leave it to Crooks & Liars to come up with a good one that manages to look past the veil:

It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions - about the privatization of our military, our culture's inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense.

Are these corporations perverting our political process? The campaign war chest for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who today said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden committed "treason," is heavily subsidized by defense and intelligence contractors that include General Dynamics, General Atomic, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Bechtel.

One might argue that a politician with that kind of backing is in no moral position to lecture others about "treason."

But Feinstein's funders are decidedly old-school Military/Industrial Complex types. What about the new crowd? This confluence of forces hasn't been named yet, so for the time being we'll use a cumbersome label: the "Security/Digital Complex."

Say It Ain't So, Peaches

David Petraeus (nicknamed Peaches as a teenager) has seen a good bit of shittiness in his career, but I get the feeling he ain't seen nothin' compared with the enormity of what's coming down on him now.

So far, it's been just kind of interesting to watch the Villagers as they cluck their tongues and wag their fingers at him, acting shocked that he'd let himself in for something like this.  I get the feeling that a bunch of 'em knew about it (or at least suspected it - because they go to the same parties as all of the players in this High School Fuck-Around Melodrama) and now they get to pretend they're not just jumping up and down on the guy's head yelling, "See?  I told you this'd blow up in your face, and you'd end up helping us sell a shitoad of diapers and deodorant".  For the Press Poodles, this is way better than the standard Dead White Girl story any day.

My take: unless there's a serious threat to People or Mission, I don't care if he's fucking frogs.  Everything else is just Reality Porn you can get on basic cable 24/7.

Not that this is related - well maybe, but barely:

Top Secret America

A coupla things are interesting when I think about this Frontline story.  First, that there's a bunch of typical rubes who love to worry about The Gubmint, but who're always worrying about stoopid shit instead of worrying about the real thing.  And second, that "The Left" did a lot of hand-wringing about power and secrecy under Bush, but are now a lot less eager to condemn these things because "our guy's in the Oval" (I can cop to that one a little bit myself).  I've heard the flip side of that coin from a few different sources as well - people self-identifying as Repubs say they were OK with Bush having that power because they trusted him, but now they feel more threatened because they don't trust Obama to do right by them.

Anyway - happy paranoia to ya'll.

Watch Top Secret America on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

I Heart Larry Wilkerson

From The Real News Network:

WILKERSON: Oh, au contraire, we don't have that choice anymore. We get two idiots to vote for every year, whose campaigns say all manner of things, but whose actual actions are not—I'll quote Ralph Nader here—virtually are not any different from Tom and Jerry. I mean, the two of them are going to do the same thing, because basically what we have today is a corporatocracy: we have the presidents and the Congress in the hands of big food, big pharmacy, big oil, finance, insurance, and real estate. Look at Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. They're quintessential representatives of those communities. And that's who runs this country now. The president doesn't run this country, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state don't run these people, and God help us, the American people don't run this country. Big money runs this country.