On the Secret Service scandal in Colombia

Can we say gross incompetence on all fronts? Once again, we have another stellar example of losers with high level security clearances having sex with prostitutes, even drawing attention to themselves because they were stupid enough to think they weren't going to pay the girls. That could be a new low, or a new degree of stupid, hard to say which. We'll go with both, in equal amounts.

If this whole thing says anything, it's that if you're in the bottom rungs of the totem pole, expect to be thrown overboard if you screw up. It doesn't matter that you were encouraged to be an irresponsible asshole because your superiors are doing it to, or that they said you were "covered," you never are. American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan playing with the shattered bodies of dead suicide bombers, insurgents, and so on, had to have felt comfortable enough to take trophy pictures, this was basically encouraged. What difference does it make when they--we--killed many of these people by invading their territory? Defiling their bodies is an afterthought to murder.

Rest assured that these Secret Service and active duty clowns stationed in Colombia for the Americas conference saw a genuine institutional lack of leadership, plenty of bad examples added to the mix, and behaved accordingly, they were encouraged. So, if you think that it was scary over twenty support security for the president are incompetent, you'd better face the fact that their bosses are bigger incompetents with the power to wreck the lives of others. Now, the media "cares" that "they could have created a security breach," when that was never a concern in the DC Madam case. Why? Because losers like Senator David Vitter are privileged to continue fucking up on your dime, they have connections to keep getting away with it.

What we have here is a serious problem of institutional culture, of determinist anthropology, the crisis of hierarchy that baffles because of how unopposed it remains. Cowardice is easy in good times, or when you're living in a bubble, removed from the effects of the economy on everyone else, and once more, we're talking about the privileged here. This process is eating the future, and if it continues to remain unchallenged, forget it, we're done. I wrote numerous observations here and elsewhere that the major players in Jeane's phone records were violating their national security clearances, to no avail, no one listened. I went so far as to bring that to David Corn's case regarding Ret. Col. Ron Roughead--he never wrote back after our initial exchange, he's made his mind up about the case, and that's not only biased, it's incompetent in my opinion. Again, we're talking about privilege, he was more concerned about keeping his hair in place for his next media appearance apparently. I don't entirely blame him: Jeane was her own worst advocate, she screwed up all over the place with her own time in front of the cameras. Being in front of them at all was the problem.

There is one set of rules for some of us, and another for the rest of us, a double standard that has no place in a genuine democracy.  Why was the issue of national security clearances of no consequence (the public line at least) in the DC Madam case? Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler must have thought so or she wouldn't have granted Jeane subpoenaing power over the entire intelligence community. This is about submissiveness to raw power. I wouldn't expect anything less from our corporate owned media.