A Bad Week For Dinosaur Media

On Friday Fox News reported that a CIA analyst had been fired for leaking classified information to the press.

"The officer has acknowledged unauthorized discussions with the media and the unauthorized sharing of classified information," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "That is a violation of the secrecy agreement that everyone signs as a condition of employment with the CIA."

One official called this a "damaging leak" that deals with operational information and said the fired officer "knowingly and willfully" leaked the information to the media and "was caught."

The CIA officer was not in the public affairs office, nor was he someone authorized to talk to the media. The investigation was launched in January by the CIA's security center. It was directed to look at employees who had been exposed to certain intelligence programs. In the course of the investigation, the fired officer admitted discussing classified information including information about classified operations.

Since then the story has exploded across the blogsphere with more and more details coming out about the leaker, one Mary McCarthy, as well as some of her interesting political connections and the impact that this will have on the reputation of the Pulitzer Prize. I for one think that this sort of thing has permanently tarnished the reputation of the Pulitzer people and The Elite Media Monoculture and rightly so. The Angry Leftists of the committee are so brazen in their hate for George W. Bush that they don't care that national security has been damaged.

McCarthy leaked her information to Dana Priest of The Washington Post who subsequently won the famed prize for the story. Obviously an investigation has been underway because it has now been reported that McCarthy failed a polygraph test before being fired from the CIA. I would imagine that criminal proceedings are in the works. But even more interesting is the backstory, because it is now clear that McCarthy is a Clinton holdover who got her job thanks to Sandy "documents in the pants" Berger.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

June 16, 1998

STATEMENT BY THE PRESS SECRETARY

National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger announced today the appointment of Mary O'Neil McCarthy as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs. Mrs. McCarthy succeeds Rand Beers.

Mary McCarthy had been Director of Intelligence Programs on the National Security Council Staff since July 1996. Previously, Mrs. McCarthy served as the National Intelligence Officer for Warning from 1994-1996 and as the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Warning from 1991-1994. She began government service in 1984 as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Prior to her government service, Mrs. McCarthy held positions in both the private sector and academia. She was a Director, then Vice President of BERI, SA, a firm conducting financial and political risk assessments, from 1979-1984. Previously, she had taught at the University of Minnesota and was Director of the Social Science Data Archive at Yale University.

Mrs. McCarthy has a B.A. and M.A. in history from Michigan State University and an M.A and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

But the story get even better. Because we now also know that McCarthy is a big Democrat contributor. In 2004 she gave thousands both to the Kerry campaign as well as to the Democratic party in Ohio.

Cliff Kincaid argues that the Tainted Pulitzer should be given back, but does anyone really think that will happen in the face of Bush Derangement Syndrome?

I didn't think so.

In this article he not only details the story of McCarthy being fired, but also points out that the story of the "secret prisons" in Europe was bogus and that to date there is no evidence of them ever existing. The real story here, as Kincaid argues, is that a left-wing faction installed in the CIA by Clinton Democrats is waging war, not against the terrorists, but against the Bush administration and doing whatever it can to bring the administration down and undermine the war on terrorism. The bogus story, leaked to the newspapers, was in fact disinformation designed to destroy American credibility and make our efforts to work with over seas allies more difficult than is already the case. This is, in a word, treason of the highest order. The individuals responsible for this, including the reporters who published the story, need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Dead-end Debates

Critics need to move on.

Victor Davis Hanson points out in this essay from The National Review that it's easy to be an armchair quarterback, as a small number of retired generals have turned out to be in recent days. Those generals are entitled to their opinions of course. But it is well to remember that they are but a small number from the total who are now serving or have retired. And just as in the realm of politics where disagreement is the means by which ideas and policies are sorted out, there are theoretical debates about how the military should be structured for the world of the 21st century. Will we see the same kinds of conflicts in this new century as we did in the past one; nation against nation and army against army on well defined battlefields? Or will this new era present us with problems that require new methods and approaches that those of the past? That is the question that one must ask, and answer in order to evaluate the present policy in Iraq, as well as the future of our war against the Islamofascists.

Saudi Liberals Get the Lash

Youssef Ibrahim writes in the New York Sun about what happens in the Barbaric Kingdom if you hire women to work at your business, even if they are doing their work over the telephone. Naturally if you happen to be a member of the Angry Left and particularly if you happen to be a screeching feminist or a second rate B movie actress with a washed up career on AirMoonbat, this sort of thing doesn't really bother you.

And on a related note, Betsy's Page points to this essay by Ralph Peters on the subject of failed states and the factors by which they may be identified.

The Frightening Truth of Why Iran Wants a Bomb

Amir Taheri writes in the London Telegraph about Iran's strategy for achieving an atomic bomb. Note that in this essay we can see the mix of the insane with the cunning. On the one hand we have a leader who believes in the "12th Imam" who apparently is one thousand years old and is the real leader of the world, in defiance of all of those history books you ever read in school. And on the other hand we have the tactic of waiting for the West to loose its will to fight and thus winning by default. Not since Hitler have we seen a mad dictator so brazen in his threats against the West or so pompous in his over-confidence.

Contrary to Amadenejad's beliefs however, numbers alone are no longer an indication of superior military power. Nor have they been for at least five centuries. Cortez defeated the Aztecs with a small handful of men because of two reasons.

The first was that the Aztecs were still bound to the world of superstition; the world of demons and spirits. They had not yet reached the level at which a people learns the superiority of reason. The Spaniards, though backwards by modern standards, still were the representatives of a modern culture which understood the laws of cause and effect and which saw the world as we see it today; driven by natural laws which can be understood and applied to human purpose. The Iranians, for all their clutching at modern technology in the form of a bomb, do not really grasp the underlying foundation for the West's technological and economic superiority.

And of course the second is the very technology which makes the use of mere numbers an anachronism. A single American division of today is more deadly than all of the armies of the past put together. Technology and training in the western mode create a lethality which no other nation or culture has been able to match, as has been pointed out by historian Victor Davis Hanson. The real question is not whether we have the capacity to take out the mad Iranian dictators and their atomic bomb program. The real question is whether we have the willingness to do so in defense of our own culture and way of life.

Policy on Iran Nukes Seems to be Off-Target

Unfortunately, as Mark Steyn writes in the Chicago Sun-Times, many people are doing their best to try not to understand the threat which we face from Islamofascists armed with atomic weapons. The disease of political correctness, which causes one to not see that madmen are mad and that a belligerent state is a danger to everyone, has taken its toll in Washington and elsewhere. Leaders who should be leading are instead looking for places to hide so that they can avoid having to make any really hard choices.

Iran and the Islamofascists have to be stopped, but one must wonder how many will die before that happens. In the 30's the leaders of the West could have stopped Hitler but did not do so because they thought that they could guarantee their safety with scraps of paper. That failure cost millions of lives and is with us to this very day. Will the West repeat that mistake again?

The Left, Online and Outraged

Liberal Blogger Finds an Outlet and a Community

David Finkel of The Washington Post brings us this article about the hate-filled Angry Left blogsphere and one Maryscott O'Connor. Ms. O'Connor apparently is filled with rage from morning till night as a result of Bush Derangement Syndrome, which is on full display at the blog MyLeftWing. This article has gotten a lot of coverage on the conservative side of the blogsphere and that is perhaps because the Post is not known for its conservative leanings.

But the portrait which this article paints is, I think, pretty accurate. All you have to do to see The Angry Left on display is to go to the biggest and most popular lefty blogs to get a taste of where they stand. Sites like the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and IndyMedia are pretty typical of what one can read on the left side of the Blogsphere. And it has been pointed out elsewhere that there tend to be some clear differences between conservative bloggers and their lefty counterparts.

For one thing I think the focus is different for each side of the blogsphere. Conservatives blogs, as a rule, tend to focus on policy issues, such as terrorism and the economy, and on the bias of the mainstream media. Lefty blogs, on the other hand, tend to focus on the evils of all things Republican with an emphasis on finding new and interesting ways to call conservatives "fascists, evil, the Bush Crime Family, paid hacks, Nazis" and all sorts of other terms, as we read in this article. And while this sort of spewing may provide an emotional outlet for the leftists who write these kinds of things, they do not constitute much of an argument to those with a hunger for serious thinking and debate.

Indeed, as Hugh Hewitt points out, this kind of blogging by those on the left is poisoning the Democratic party with a style of rhetoric which many Americans find repellent and which is quite unlikely to win them many elections either now or in the future. Rather, as the Democratic party moves farther and farther to the left, they will be seen as more and more out of touch with the average voter. And that does not bode well for the future of the Democratic party.

Right from the Beginning

Right invasion, wrong explanation.

Jonah Goldberg goes back once a gain to show that we had very good reason to go into Iraq. And indeed, to the rational mind, there can be little doubt about the necessity of going into Iraq for a variety of reasons having to do with our own national security. But still the Angry Left refuses to open their eyes and see the big picture, preferring instead to repeat the mantra "Bush Lied, Kids Died" as if it were some sort of magic spell that would release them from having to face the facts of reality. The bottom line is that Saddam was a real threat both us and his neighbors and now he is in a jail cell where he can threaten no one. All of us are better of because of it, even if the left remains forever blind, as they almost certainly will.

Your Own Lying Eyes

Why aren’t reporters embedded with new Iraqi forces?

Michael Ledeen points out what many in the blogsphere already understand; that our military is brilliant at fighting military battles, but the pentagon is falling down when it comes to the information war. And make no mistake about it, the war against the Islamofascists is an information war and will remain one. The terrorists are very quick to manufacture "atrocities" committed by allied forces because they cannot win on the battlefield. And our own 5th column media is quick to parrot the terrorists fabrications as if they had really happened and ignore the real story when it comes out a few days later. What we need is on the spot reporting to get the story out first and make sure that the killers don't get the opportunity to shape events.

Let Soros Speak!

GOP cynicism and 527s.

Rich Lowry of The National Review argues, correctly, that both political parties have been brimming with hypocrisy when it comes to campaign finance reform. How tempting it is to use your government power to try to silence your opponents rather than engage them in the true give and take of political debate. If the politicians in both parties wanted to do us all a favor, they would remove all limits on political donations to campaigns, as long as they come from Americans, and list every single one on a freely available website for all to see. What is needed is transparency, not more controls.

The Liberal Baby Bust

And in a related story Phillip Longman of USA Today writes about the demographic changes which portend the death of liberalism. As James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal has written, birth rates for liberal-leftists are significantly lower than those for conservative Republicans. In the most recent elections, Republicans votes came from states that have the highest birth rates, while Democrats got their votes from states with low birth rates. Simply put, red states are growing in population while blue states are losing population. Liberals cannot win elections unless people are present to vote for them, but liberals just don't have kids in the same numbers as conservatives and thus the future will be one in which there are more and more conservatives and fewer liberals.

Who Wants to live to 150?

Ronald Bailey of The Times Online writes about the coming breakthroughs in biology and medicine which will greatly extend the human lifespan and thus expand the limits of human potential. Personally I would love to have an extra hundred years to paint, read, blog and study Aikido. Wouldn't you?

Pour It On

Whatever Laura's feeding George, it's working.

In this article by Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal, we take a look at the President's performance this week and how much better it has been than the recent past. When the President talks to regular people out in Fly Over Country he is in his element. I think he needs to go there a lot more often if he wants to make his case. Certainly the Elite Media is not going to allow him to make in the areas which they control. And the President seems to understand this now as he is touting alternative media including blogs.

This has been a very interesting week for The Elite Media Monoculture who have been put on the defensive by a variety of different events. With Larva Ingraham going on the Today Show, Hugh Hewitt on CNN and the President giving several speeches this week, the issue of MSM hostility to American defense policy came to the forefront. Perhaps the most revealing moment of this week occurred when a woman at one of these speeches spoke up about the effects of media bias on the war effort and got thunderous applause from the audience. This kind of response tells you all you have to know about the continuing collapse of Dinosaur Media.

Taliban Man at Yale

The story thus far.

In this article from The Wall Street Journal, John Fund brings us up to date with the story of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a propagandist with the fascist Taliban who has only a fourth grade education. Having accepted Mr. Hashemi into Yale, the school will now have to explain to the other 19,300 students who will be getting rejection letters this week why they don't deserve a place at Yale, but a terrorist thug who believes women should wear burkas and homosexuals should have walls pushed over onto them is a better candidate for a "liberal" education. Perhaps Yale thinks that all of the students who didn't make the cut are retarded.

The Impeachment Agenda

Russ Feingold reveals what many Democrats really want.

The Democrats don't have a plan for the economy. They don't have a plan for the war against the Islamofascists. And they don't have a plan to deal with border security. But they think they can win the next election and take back the house because they really hate George Bush!!!

The Stone Face of Zarqawi

Iraq is no "distraction" from al Qaeda.

Christopher Hitchens is always lucid and detail oriented when it comes to the subject of defense and the war on the terrorists. In this essay from The Wall Street Journal he delves into the issue of civil war in Iraq, which he argues has been the strategy of the Islamofascists all along. It would serve their purpose and make our job far more difficult, to say nothing of how it would impact the Iraqi people or the political dynamics of the region. So while the moonbats are stamping their feet claiming that Bush is Hitler, the rest of us who actually have brains can consider the grave implications if we fail to finish the task in Iraq.

Sayed and de Man at Yale

The campus that ran off a Nazi propagandist today welcomes one from the Taliban.

John Fund reports in this lengthy essay about the Taliban propagandist who has been given a prize position at Yale university and how the school is attempting to gloss over the obvious hypocrisy involved in allowing such a thug to attend an American institution devoted to freedom of intellectual inquiry. You have to read the intellectual evasions and excuses given in this article to believe they could be mouthed by anyone who didn't have cabbage for brains. Interestingly John Fund also looks at how past individuals who were the darlings of the left were treated regarding their inglorious past lives. Needless to say, the left always looks for ways to avoid having to pass judgment on their own.

Rocks and Ripples

Playing it smart in the Middle East.

Victor Davis Hanson argues in this National Review article that the time has come to stop subsidizing failure in the Middle East. And indeed we have thrown billions at autocrats and dictators year after year in the vain hope that it would buy us protection from something much worse. Of course, like all protection rackets, it didn't and we suffered many attacks on our people right up to 9-11. It is time to stop protecting the people of the Arab world from the consequences of their own foolish beliefs and bad policies. Then we will get real democracy.

Segregated Screenwriters

Crash is not my L.A.

Catherine Seipp asks whether the liberals in Hollywood who like to lecture us about our "racism" are not a bit segregated themselves and thus out of touch with the "little people" who actually get along with each other rather well all things considered.

A Diplomatic Triumph

Dubya in India.

Rich Lowry reports on the President's trip to India and the importance to America of the largest Democracy in central Asia. Indeed, in several areas we have common interests with India, not least the war against Islamofascism. India has been the target of many attacks by Muslim fanatics over the years. We thus have very good reason to work with India to defeat the barbarians who have attacked us.

With Friends Like This…

Let’s talk about the UAE.

I have held off in commenting about the Dubai Ports deal because I wanted to know more about it. But I have to say that the more I read about it the less I like it. In this article by Alex Alexiev we can see just what kind of people we are dealing with and the picture is not pleasant. It is clear that the UAE falls into that category of Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia, that are "friends" with us in name only and are at the same time working feverishly behind the scenes to advance the Wahabbist ideology of Jihad against the inferior Infidels of the West. I can see no good reason to reward this kind of behavior with a favorable trade deal which also compromises our security.

Worst Case Reality

Air America Appears To Lose Flagship Station

Brian Maloney of The Radio Equalizer reports that AirMoonbat Radio may be losing its flagship station, WLIB in New York, to a change in station ownership. If that is the case, it may well be the final, fatal blow to the Angry Leftist Moonbat Network that has been plagued by mismanagement, financial scandal and abysmal ratings. And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of useful idiots.