This is the single most disgusting aspect of the current environment in Washington. What these people did was disgusting. David Brooks had a good column in the NYT's Saturday edition, still available online.

Remember the "tit for tat" leaking that went on running up to the election? Imagine how infuriating it must have been for Bush and Co to just sit there and take it, rather than rise to the bait and lay waste to the entire CIA. But the election is over now, and those miserable cocksuckers leaking classified information for partisan reasons are STILL screaming on their way out the door (note the immediate leaks from Langley basically saying, "The CIA is so weakened with the loss of these great leaders").

This reminds me of when Rumsfeld, pissed off about leaks re: Iraq during the runup to the war, told people in a closed-door meeting that there were to be absolutely no, zip, zero leaks going forward, or heads would roll, he really means it this time.

The content and minutes of that meeting was leaked about an hour after it was over.

These are the people in this country who should know, better than anyone, the dangers facing our citizens. Instead of doing the "right thing", ie, gritting their teeth and assisting the elected head of government, they dig their heels in like a bunch of angry union members at the local Department of Motor Vehicles, intentionally sabatoging the administration based on their own parochial political beliefs.

And they feel perfectly right in doing so.

These people are traitors. They would be traitors no matter who was running the country. They are scum of the worst kind, even bigger transgressors than our avowed terrorist enemies. So to all you scumbags in Langley and Foggy Bottom, not only will you no longer have your careers, you will have to face, now, the fact that you have no honor, that you betrayed your countrymen, and you don't even get a paycheck for doing it anymore.

If "The Unelected, Liberal-Leaning Federal Bureaucracy" is one fourth as bad as we all suspect it is after eight years of Bill Clinton's Soviet-Style purges, than this housecleaning is four years overdue. But let's not imitate Stalin/Clinton, let's do it right.

"The CIA was betting on a Kerry victory? Hm. Nailed another one, huh, CIA? Boy, you guys are good."

Ya know, as "incompetent" as these guys seem now, it still doesn't seem wise to openly taunt the CIA on your website. You never know when they'll get their shit together.

I'm betting on a Bush bureaucratic victory, myself.

I think my powers of prognostication on this score exceed the CIA's.

Well, the CIA are liberal Democrats, so anything they want to do is OK.

The most recent CIA leak to UPI call Goss and his lieutenants "meanies." Big, mean meanies!

Ever watch Yes Minister, Ace?

Not only a den of vipers, incompetent ones at that. Root them out, Mr. Goss.

A big part of the problem of how to deal with a rogue CIA (and State Dept.) is the civil service laws, which contravene the fundamental principle of voter sovereignty: that the voters are supposed to be able to throw the bums out. Civil service laws only allow us (through our elected executive office holders) to throw out a tiny fraction of the bums. The principle of voter sovereignty is actually ensconsed in the Constitution, in the guarantee to the states that they shall have a republican form of govt. For a discussion of this guarantee, and how it might be brought into play, click on my link.

I'm going to assume you understand that the lot you're ranting about here is a minority in the organizations mentioned. I'm not saying that the liberals are a minority (at least at State they're not), but the ones actively opposing the administration's policies are. And they're the ones who are higher up, and can afford to get canned or ignore the threat to get shipped off to Ulan Bataar (or Baghdad for that matter). Those of us who enjoy our jobs, and really do want to support our nation's goals, no matter which party is dictating them, keep our heads down and do our work diligently, carefully, and to the best of our ability (there may be some redundancy there, sorry). I've seen liberals that are so far left that they think Mao was closed-minded, bitch for hours about how Bush et al. are running the US into the ground (behind closed doors) and then go out and take foreign officials to the mat for the same administration they despise. That's what professional diplomats do. Some, of course, have spoken their disagreement aloud, within the organization. We have a special method of sending this "dissent" up the ladder, but it doesn't leave the building. And if it doesn't get listened to (a la Iraq), the dissenters quit. And you've got to respect that.

What I'm getting at here is that there are FSOs (I'm not going to try to defend the spooks, they can do that for themselves) out bleeding and dying in Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia, the Balkans and wherever else bad shit is going down in this world, trying to make things better and trying to protect America's interests. We'd appreciate if you limit, or least define, your targets when you throw around words like "traitor" and "rogue". You're, for the most part, talking about the bigwigs and not the rank-and-file. No, we weren't elected. We self-selected. We chose to take lower salaries, deal with a crazy bureacracy, and live in the most bumfuck, backasswards places on this great Earth in order to promote and protect the country we all love. No, we didn't choose to get shot at like our colleagues in the military, but we also don't get to shoot back (generally) and you never know when Abdullah, who's down-on-his-luck-but-up-on-Allah, is going to show up in the most unlikely of places.

Basically, we're not all here sucking down your tax dollars and bitching about how stupid you red-staters are. I'm not asking for your praise (that'll never happen, State: The Jan Brady of the Federal Government), I'm just asking for you not to call me Benedict Arnold or call me worse than UBL.

PS - Using Joel Mowbray as a source automatically invalidates your argument, no matter how well thought out it is. Mowbray's bias against the State Department makes Dan Rather's bias against the right (and sanity while we're at it) look positively minor.

This particular problem, that of leftish ideologically indoctrinated bureaucrats, is not merely another, but the core problem in governance in the US.

This difficulty has existed for some time but has received little attention since those most likely to be aware of the problem do not see it as a problem. The bureaucracy as well as the news mediatends to be peopled and controlled by those whose UNCONSCIOUS (and usually totally unquestioned) perspective is that of a vaguely leftish, andti capitalist, anti American University don.

Since the people who man the "talk" business and the bureaucracy are usually reasonably intelligent and verbal they are certain their ideas are sound. However,because they have gone to contemporary Universities, they are far more poorly educated than they know and unable to distinguish between well meant "wettish" attitudinism and clearly thought out ideas.

They are, to use an outdated word, almost entirely "middle brow" while believing their ideas are of the highest quality.

It is a problem which plagued China for several thousand years. Now we too have a mandarin class. These people are, however, far more dangerous than mandarins. They can impose sheer stupidity in the name of doing "good" to more people than the most arrogant mandarin ever could.