Analogies

Let's see if I remember how the SATs went.

34) blowing the cover of a CIA agent:illegal disclosure that damages national security :: _______________:illegal disclosure that damages national security

(a)publishing tactical maps of all US troop locations in Iraq
(b)selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union
(c)giving Osama bin Laden blueprints and security codes to the 12 most densely populated buildings in America's twelve most densely populated cities
(d)reporting truthfully about CIA agents acting on executive authority to use interrogation techniques banned under domestic law, the US military code, and a raft of international treaties and coventions

If you answered (d), well sir, consider your acceptance letter from the Yale admissions committee in the mail. Du bist ein Genie, as the krauts say.

Thus would blogger Bill Nienhuis, whose name isn't kraut exactly but whatever the derogatory term for the Dutsch is [pot smoking gay-married prostitutes?--ed.], have scored your test. Nienhuis is a master of all things analogical and metaphorical; comparisons are his thing. The accurate reporting on CIA prisoner interrogation, you see, is just like "throwing national security under the bus," both because it damages national security, and because you can throw national security under a bus about as easily as you can throw, I dunno, an Afghan detainee under the bus. And if you did throw a detainee under a bus, you need not have a heavy heart or a conflicted conscience. (MSM reporting will break your morale, that's inevitable, which is why it's so important to get the real truth out there.) As long as you only got a leg under the bus (or some other part he didn't need), and you dope him up real good with truth serum which'll also dull the pain, and you just want him to tell you on which East Village street corner* Osama planted a ticking hydrogen bomb (oh, he knows**, and American lives are at stake here), and you promise him that once he tells you the bad people will go away, and you didn't specifically intend to torture him, and your goal was intelligence gathering (I mean, c'mon, you're an American intelligence agent, people might say you inflict wanton cruelty for no reason but that can't be true because you're an American intelligence agent***), fear not. You didn't torture anybody. Because permanent life-threatening injury or death (is losing a limb life-threatening? maybe it is in those wimpy blue states, but not over here in, okay I'm in Bethesda, but my blog is in cyberspace so I technically live everywhere and that includes real states like Wyoming) and a specific and exclusive intent to torture with foreknowledge of what torture is, are essential parts of the timeless and everlasting definition of torture. That we made up three years ago. That we don't do.

Oh Nienhuis, where would we be without you? What hope as a nation, nay, as a community of nations, could we have to be free and secure loved children of the one almighty and eternal God of Abraham and Isaac and the important evangelical leaders in the Republican party---who represent what the true Jackonian spirit of America that the French party I mean Democrats are out of touch with which is why they lose elections but not Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell cause they said some idiotarian things a while back so they therefore have no consituency in the GOP and nobody should pay attention to them---if we could not see the divine spark reflecting from directly from your monitor out into this fragile mortal coil? I mean, it's just holy wisdom that motivates your curiosity about how ABC news could be so confident about their report when George W. Bush---who any fair-minded person would conclude is simultaneously the reincarnation of Themistocles, Churchill, and Reagan, except that that's a Hindu idea and Hindu is too damn close to Muslim to be able to tell them apart but still he's their reincarnation in thought and word and deed and courage, and rather like the philosopher Jesus in that he suffers persecution gladly, safe in the knowledge that God has placed him in the world for a purpose and ordained his path---says that we don't torture. Because, as you rightly point out, goodsir Nienhuis, ABC got whatever facts they got because ABC doesn't want to get scooped like they did on Abu Ghraib and don't care what the consequences of their reporting are for national security and want to bring down the president at the same time they're blindly ambitious and they dug hard enough to find somebody in the CIA who would talk about what was going on but it wasn't that hard because the CIA is a disloyal wing of the government and they don't care what the broader consequences of their actions are as long as they can gain some ground in their intra-executive turf war. If it had been an unreliable MSM-credentialed newspaper reporter laying out the causes and motives of this crushing blow to national security---and what could crush national security worse than throwing it under a bus, except maybe two buses---or even a blogger, all of whom (except the moonbat bloggers of course) take time to get the facts straight and don't let bias influence their presentation of the facts, i.e., just the opposite of yer MSM-gatekeeper elitist relic of the past-I-mean-it's-the-21st-century-BLOG!!!BLOG!!!BLOG!!!---I would have assumed that he had forgotten to mention the third explanation, but he's so smart that he knows without knowing us that those of us who know how to read esoterically as well as exoterically wouldn't need to be reminded of it. The third option, of course, is that ABC just made it up, similar to the way that Dan Rather typed up the national guard memos on MS Word and then spilled coffee on the printout to yellow the pages and make them look like they were from the 70s, and also similar to the way everything else that Powerline ever reported on got 100% right no matter what any Traitorcrat blogger says about stopped clocks being right twice a day.

There's only one Bill Nienhuis, and let's just be glad he's on our side in this war, cuz if he was on the other side like Jimmy Carter, we'd have thrown in the towel by September 18 (the day after the day after the day after the day after the day after the day after the day that changed everything) at the latest.

*Your conventional detective work nailed it down to lower Manhattan, and you're pretty sure it's in the East Village. There's one piece of the puzzle missing. Are you willing to lose 10 million American lives because you're worried what those goddamned oil-bribe taking faggots in the UN or the lying weaselly scumbag hypocritical obstructionist French who lost their civilization cuz they stopped being Christian and the let the Ay-rabs from northern Africa emigrate just cuz they were subjects of France's colonial empire and spoke French and wanted to live in a country with a higher standard of living than Algeria even if it meant doing some shit job that no native fondue-dipper would come within 100 metres of if you gave him a football stadium-sized supply of cigarettes an' a battle-ship sized supply of syphilitic Breton prostitutes an' all the frogs legs fried in snail slime it would take him twenty lifetimes to eat? If so, sir, you're nothing but a pussy. And you can't be trusted with something as vital as our national security.

**And just to make it clear: This isn't some liberal media crock of shit like some unlucky peasant who happened to be the only one of the 540 Hassan al-Hussein's in the metropolitan Kandahar area whose name wasn't on the terrorist watch list, who got picked up by mistake (yeah, where'd you read that? the MSM, huh? you trust the MSM? I mean, hot-damn you are one gullible motherfucker). This is a legit crisis. This guy's got vital info. Like I said, he knows where Osama put the ticking nuclear time bomb. He heard from his second cousin Ghazi in Baluchistan who heard from his wife's friend Jamilah who lives in Islamabad and hears all the big city gossip who heard from her brother Fawzi the traveling Quran salesman who heard from Jabbar a Jordanian Muslim missionary in Jakarta who heard from Harkono, a recent convert (who was thrilled to learn that his homosexuality was a disease and that prayer, reverence, and public hanging were the cure), who was told only two years ago by Leona, the Singaporese transsexual (or Mak nyah, as the wogs over there say)with whom he had a brief but torrid affair which he remained in because he fell in love with her after finding out about you know what (but actually he knew all along and used dating a shemale as a front to deceive himself about being gay as well as allow him to not feel like he's lying when he tells his parents he's dating women now and the "problem" is over). Like I said, this guy knows where the bomb is. You wouldn't be torturing him if he didn't know. Because you can only torture somebody who's a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative (and yes, everybody in al-Qaeda is a high ranking operative, I see you don't know how the new physics works). That's also part of the definition of torture. Forgot to mention it (my bad---but see: self-correcting blogosphere in action!). But you also aren't torturing him, because we don't torture. You've got a choice to make between making Old Europe happy and saving American lives. When American lives are at stake, the right choice isn't just what makes you feel good about your self. Sometimes, it's the hard choice. Like opening secret non-existing non-gulags in abandoned NKVD re-education centers. That was a hard choice. Good thing we have a man like George W. Bush around to make the hard choices. Because if a spineless flip-flopper like Kerry got in there, he probably would have chickened out and not opened the secret dungeons that don't exist. Hard choices. Your socialist professors tried to teach you that there isn't complexity in everything, like Palestinian-hangings, which are difficult to construct a moral theory for, and certainly don't admit of simple absolute rules. Every choice is hard, and everything's complex, except for all of geopolitics, which is simple: There's America, and then there's the countries that wish they were America but not in that jealous way, just a genuine, man you guys are awesome, I know what I'll do, I'll bet all my credibility and the legacy I will hand down to future generations and the image that history books will present of me to a guy who needs to be talked out of bombing al-Jazeera (and hey, if somebody like that can't manage to be a revaluator of values, at least I get to hang out with him a lot and seem incredibly smart by contrast) sort of way. That's one side. Then there are the terrorists and the people who apologize for terrorism, and really they're all just terrorists. And also the people in America who disagree with the president---no, not all of them, I'm not a McCarthyite, just the ones who say they disagree with terrorism anywhere with 10,000 miles of a soldier who might have his morale crushed by hearing our leader criticized or a jihadist who was only a little bit into jihad but now that he's heard domestic dissent within the USA he's become super-emboldened and gets on the next plane to Baghdad where he has to fight us cause as long as we're there he can't fight us here and starts recruiting and training new jihadists all because of some jerk who didn't have the courtesy to keep his treasonous thoughts to himself while we're at open-ended war, thanks very much, but none of that means that the jihadist wouldn't have made it to Baghdad even if we'd never invaded Iraq because we're not the cause of any problems in Iraq, the terrorists are, and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had a Hitler-Stalin pact even if that metaphor hurts my argument because I'm claiming that Hussein was on the side of jihad and not just in a temporary tactical cease-fire with it---yeah, those kinds of Americans, they're on the other side too.

***Let's see what the MSM deal with that logic. However, they do it, I bet it'll be in a way that's objectively pro-fascist.
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Okay folks, let's get serious. There's some kind of acute paranoiac amnesia germ going around and you're apparently at extra risk if you award yourself a gold star every time you hit the publish button and stick it to the MSM and cross the frontier into that glorious future of self-publishing citizen journalists who bring the news straight from Baghdad---I mean, let's face facts, if you think of a time, and it's any time later than now, there's bound to be an American troop presence in Baghdad, at least outside the green zones where everything is safe and schools and hospitals and women walking out at night unaccompanied and parents name their first male child "George" and their second male child "Hat" after 47th president, visionary, and all around Mann mit dem Hut Roger L. Simon---to your computer using really powerful telescopes without ever having to get out of their desk chair or take off their pajamas or do a sit up...where was I...yeah, if you're one of those guys, you should probably call the CDC and see if they can give you a full body biohazard suit as a loner till the epidemic passes, because it's transmitted whenever warbloggers get together and have a big-ol' cyberspace circle jerk and then retire to their respective homes which they never left and fire up the old cyber-printing press and compose a longish think-post about their experiences among these many brilliant and serious and tragically compelled to assume all the world's burdens as their own colleagues of theirs, the Achilleses and Achillesatrixes of the world of ideas. This infection is where you are, so promise to be careful, because we can't afford to lose you, because then what will stand in the way of our brave men and women serving over sees and the terrible, terrible words hurled at them everyday but unthinking and uncaring and just plain malicious politicians to greater lethal effect than anything Iraq's homegrown bin Ladenist insurgency, I mean strike that I didn't say insurgency I don't mean it just tell me what the word we're using now is, is it homicide bombers which don't worry, I know, is not a redundancy nor an idiotic substitution for "suicide bomber" because "suicide bomber" isn't more descriptive or anything, it's just something that people say because they want to express sympathy for the terrorists and study their ways instead of fighting them.
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Okay, seriously, for real seriously this time. I found the Bachelour Nienhuis's little (but also really big, when you think about it) contribution to our understanding of our world and our society and our place in both via a link from...guess who...that's right, the innovator and technician, libertarian futurist, the one and only white hot ball of dispassionate objective presentation of facts that the is too incompetent to give you and too warped with Bush Derangement Syndrome to give you, the blogfather who in whose capacious womb we were all immaculately conceived a new, the prophet-philosopher who demonstrated by dialectic, by analytic, and by antinomy, that the nature of pure reason itself entails that patriotism is the fundamental determinant of truth, and in an encore performance equalled the first despite the metaphysical impossibility of doing so, that any plausible conceptual analysis of patriotism will reduce patriotism to unflinching cocooning loyalty to the President except when he's soft on immigration or signs a pork-laden appropriations bill that isn't his fault really because corruption is everywhere and even if it was his fault the Democrats are worse and their first instinct is to cut and run...you guessed it yet...INSTAPUNDIT, known occasionally by his alias Glenn Reynolds, the guise he uses when it is necessary for him to be in pondering mode, like when he frets over what will happen to freedom of the press after the backlash inspired by people like Glenn Reynolds consensually renting out his blog space to anyone who had a nightmare in which a worldwide secret conspiracy called MSM too uncomfortable with technology to get what blogging's all about but comfortable enough with technology to run a worldwide secret conspiracy was feverishly plotting to bring our president down and hand victory to the terrorists, just as long as said dreamer was prudent enough to commit the dream to paper, i.e., a blog post.

The Insta-post that links to Nienhuis is, in its entirety:

INDEED: "It's as if the whole Valerie Plame matter never happened."

The original content, of course, is the "INDEED," which does, you know, add a layer of meaning both to the excerpt and the large piece from which it is drawn. It also added to the tease, okay I'll say it if no one else will, the sexual excitement bound up in seeing what lay beyond that link: could it have been some expose of Joseph Wilson, some vindication of Judith Miller perhaps, or a round up of things Tom Maguire said vis-a-vis something.

P.S. See Henley, Jim.

P.P.S. I know the countdown is over already, and I'm not saying this should be at the top, but I'm pretty damn sure this post deserves a spot somewhere (like #6b maybe). Just sayin'.

PLACE-HOLDING NOTE: Just wait till I add a gajillion links to all the little subtle references and insidery goodies.