Comments: Grandmother Takes on a Liberal

Comments, Responses and Further Info.


The Wise I has a little Yahoo newsgroup called Fishtalk. To subscribe to this newsgroup, send an email to FishTalk-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

This is not a heavily trafficked newsgroup and consists mostly of links and highlights of my current Blog entry. A few other individuals post links and essays of their own but until now, the newsgroup had a distinctly conservative bent.

We’ve been invaded by a liberal.

And this guy is a doozy of a liberal as yon reader will see below.

How this Larry Lawson got it into his head that the Fishtalk Yahoo newsgroup would be the perfect recipient for his outrageous liberal rants or links to same is a mystery to me. One can ascertain fairly quickly that Fishtalk is a conservative newsgroup and for sure the Blog to which there is always a link is definitely conservative, even being part of a conservative web ring!

Every night my husband complains about this fellow AND the liberal himself has responded to my recent blog posting titled “What’s Going On at the CIA”.

So I wrestle with myself. Should I oust the liberal from the newsgroup? He does post some of the most outrageous liberal nonsense, including banning assault weapons due to the recent Minnesota hunting incidents, rants asserting the Holocaust never happened, and below, read on, total silliness about the CIA.

But hey, the fella could be converted to a nice conservative once he takes a bath and combs his hair. He certainly CARES enough and I’ve always liked people that cared about stuff, even if caring in a bent direction.

So I decided I am going to respond this one time to his direct answer to me as well as to the essay he quotes in defense of his claims.

Maybe when I’m done he’ll see what he’s up against.

From Larry:

Pat, bear in mind that daddy Bush was the HEAD of the CIA. USAma was
THEIR boogeyman. They met with him in July 2001 when he needed
dialysis. The CIA is pretending to BE Al-quaeda and the MOSSAD is
recruiting FOR Al-CIA-DUH!

First, I do know that George H. Bush was head of the CIA once. Frankly I consider that quite interesting and often ponder if this is why Dubya held onto Tenet for so long. Seems I recall Tenet was one of the elder Bush’s loyal employees.

And yes, Larry, I do think that Osama was probably a CIA boogeyman, if you consider a boogeyman someone bad the CIA should be trying to find. Love your cute spelling of “USAma”.
As for the CIA meeting with Osama when he needed dialysis, I’d love to know your source for this. Although it could have happened and if it did, so what? This was back in the early 80’s or some such. Who knows what the prevailing thinking was then?

As for your assertion that the CIA is pretending to Be Al Queda and the Mossad is recruiting For Al-CIA=DUH!, son , I have no idea what you are talking about.

Included in with Larry’s response was the following missive, penned by
Justin Raimondo , his alleged site.

November 15, 2004
Purge at the CIA
You will follow the (neocon) party line, comrade …
by Justin Raimondo

Like another empire founded on ideological hubris, and stained with
The blood of countless victims, this one engages in periodic political
purges: when one faction is vanquished, mass firings occur in the
upper echelons of the bureaucracy. We don't send them to the gulag – at
least, not yet – instead we set them up for public pillorying, firings, and,
in some cases, show trials. Such is the fate of the CIA in the
post-election triumph of the Bushies.

The news that Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West
is Losing the War on Terror, is leaving the agency – forced out by an
administration that confuses fealty to the imperial presidency with
loyalty to the country – signals the systematic dismantling of the
country's last and best defense against a burgeoning threat to our
national security. Last Tuesday, Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the
CIA –and, up until 1999 in charge of the task force assigned to track Osama
bin Laden – was defiantly declaring:

"I'm proud to work [at the CIA], and they can say what they want about
me, but I have no intention of leaving. They may force me to leave,
they may fire me. But it's the best place to work that I know of. I'm proud
to be an intelligence officer, and I want to stay one."

But by Friday Scheuer was already out, as was the news of a general
purge of the CIA. ''There will be no more Imperial Hubris books,''
said one intelligence official. "The word is out: The place is under
lockdown."

The views expressed in Imperial Hubris – that we aren't hated for our
vaunted "freedom" to show Viagra ads on television, but because of a
foreign policy that is idiotic, Israeli-centric, and irredeemably evil
to many millions of Muslims throughout the world – are shared by a
significant number of intelligence professionals at the CIA. Scheuer
and his co-thinkers are fierce critics of the Iraq war and occupation, and
in the run-up to the invasion they "leaked" a considerable body of
material that debunked the lies of the War Party – and accurately
predicted the ensuing disaster. Now they are being blamed, excoriated,
and purged by the likes of John "Boots on the ground" McCain, who
smears them as a "rogue agency" and is among the loudest calling
for "reform."

He is joined by the liberals' favorite neocon, David Brooks, whose
softly wonkish demeanor masks a characteristic tendency to go for the
jugular:

"Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to
have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents
are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices
of the Central Intelligence Agency."

At least Brooks is consistent. In an empire, we are all the subjects
Of the Emperor, and loyalty to him as our ruler and leader is paramount.
In a republic, however, we are all citizens, all equals, who pledge
allegiance "to the flag and to the republic for which it stands" – not
to the imperial presidency.

Intelligence "reform," to Brooks, McCain, and the War Party, consists
Of getting rid of those people who said what the president and his neocon
cronies didn't want to hear, and accurately foretold the coming implosion of American policy on the battlefields of Iraq:

"At the height of the campaign, CIA officials, who are supposed to
serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak
after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of
prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In
mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or
apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A.
official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long
felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in
the Arab world."

Brooks neglects to mention that the CIA had been saying precisely the
same things well before the campaign season began: during the long
run-up to war, the CIA was "leaking" front and center, denying that
the"evidence" of Iraqi WMD proffered by the administration was up to
snuff, disdaining Saddam's alleged links to al-Qaeda, descrying the regional
consequences of a U.S. invasion to "liberate" the country, and making
the argument – advanced by many Republican "realists" – that the
"blowback" would not be worth it. Instead, the ideologues won out, and
their flaky program of imposing "democracy" at gunpoint was given a
trial run – with catastrophic results, both for the people of Iraq and
the U.S.

The mass purge – as many as 90-plus "resignations" and firings – will
decimate the experienced leadership cadre of the Agency, and wipe out
the last vestiges of resistance to the supremacy of the neocons within
the administration. Newly-installed CIA director Porter Goss is
presiding over the virtual dismantling of our first line of defense
against the very real danger of terrorism visited on American shores.

In the world of Washington politics, those intelligence analysts whose
predictions turn out to have been correct are gotten rid of, while the
neocons who deluded themselves into thinking the Iraqi people would
greet us as "liberators" are not only kept on but are up for promotion.
It all makes perfect sense – if you're living in Bizarro World, where
Up is down, right is wrong, and Richard Perle is an honest man.

Folks, I cut 2/3’s out of this essay. Which says, in eleventy billion paragraphs, that the Muslims hate us because we like Israel.

Okay, Justin and Larry, you’ve had your say.

Should he be kicked off the newsgroup? He can always go directly to my Blog in search of my wisdom. But on the newsgroup, ah, he gets to put his tripe directly in front of mine eyes.