The Liberal Media's New Best Friend: The Unelected, Liberal-Leaning Federal Bureaucracy

Porter Goss is tossing out the riff-raff at the CIA, and from what everyone's saying, Condi Rice is at State in order to get that bureaucracy to actually try to advance our Commander-in-Chief's foreign policy. And it's going to be an "or else" sort of deal.

In fact, she's there to "clean house."

This of course won't go down well with the State Department suits.

And it certainly won't go down well with the liberal media.

The media has this odd habit of championing whatever bases of power Democrats control. When Reagan was President, they fretted about him riding roughshod over the Democrat-controlled Congress. But when Clinton was President, they savaged Newt Gingrich for his congressional "obstructionism," and hanged the unpopular government shut-down on him.

And they're always very big boosters of the purported right of our unelected, and largely liberal, judiciary to take the most difficult political questions out of our hands and impose a "constitutional" resolution on us all.

The Democrats have lost most of the institutions through which they once exerted power, and now they just may lose the judiciary, too.

But that still leaves the bureaucracy.

Over the coming months we will hear more and more from our neutral and objective media about how terribly important it is that we have an unelected corps of civil servants imposing their own policy preferences on the nation, because they're smarter and more knowlegeable than the idiots we actually elected to make such decisions.

It Goes Without Saying Update: Chris Matthews was all a-twitter last night over his fear that Bush will no longer have voices of dissent to counsel against his idiocy/lunacy.

I'm all in favor of hearing out voices of dissent. They're often right. Of course I want my President to hear from all sides and have a vigorous debate before making important national-security moves.

But the State Department and CIA have not merely advised the President and his staff against actions. They've undertaken a deliberate and pre-meditated campaign of undermining his decisions, both through chronic, and often illegal leaking, as well as simple insubordination-- refusing to comply with a legal order.

These people are employees. They would do well to remember that, even if Chris Matthews has forgotten.

David Brooks Update: AndrewF suggests this David Brooks column about the CIA's shadow war on Bush's policies:

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.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. 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.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

I can't help but think that a right-leaning CIA, busy subverting the policies of a left-leaning President, would be termed insubordinate, dangerous, possibly insane and borderline treasonous by the left-wing press.

When the roles are reversed-- hey, they're just trying to inform the American people, right? Just trying to be necessary voices of dissent against an arrogant administration.

And By the Way: The CIA was betting on a Kerry victory?

Hm. Nailed another one, huh, CIA? Boy, you guys are good.

posted by Ace at 01:32 PM

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