...if it weren't for those meddlin' CIA kids.

(Spoken by an old guy in what's left of a minotaur costume).

You know, the way some people talk, when someone is assigned any sort of covert status for a particular job, it means that all of a sudden they vanish from visible society, skulk in darkened alleys and abandoned warehouses, and wear dark sunglasses while speaking through a voice changer.

Valerie Plame never claimed that the CIA made her entire existence 'covert'.

She never claimed that they gave her an invisibility cloak, or face replacement surgery, or rubbed off her fingerprints.

The covert part was that Brewster Jennings was a CIA front, and that her job was therefore a CIA position. Brewster Jennings would hardly have succeeded as a front company if everyone employed by the firm were faceless nobodies in dark glasses and trench coats.

So now it's right wing dogma that our problem in intelligence wasn't Bush Jr. ignoring every screaming warning he was given, it was that people finally stopped the US' CIA from actually supporting genocidalists in Guatemala, exposing CIA contract agents who murdered American citizens in support of an actual genocidal regime, one which the CIA materially supported.

Just like always, the right's only response is to fantasize that if only their tough guy fantasies of being able to shoot bang bang and torture, no matter how stupidly, anywhere in the world, then, oh, then we'd finally be safe.

And Valerie Plame was never 'covert' because she went out in public and forgot to wear her cloak of invisibility.

Glenn has truly hit the nail on the head with this one, though one of the Sadly No! folks is working on a book more overtly to this subject.

"Cultural conservatism" consisting of Southern-accented old white guys talking about how them gays is wrong, combined with absolutely fake pretensions of machismo among cowards and scoundrels and snobs who avoided any chance to either serve honorably or to ever rationally give the slightest tinker's damn about how their wars would affect the real troops on the ground.

And the pundits who worship them.

What ties them together? An extreme, obvious to all-but-them homo-eroticism.

God, I thought they'd have to hire extra floor cleaners in theaters when "300" premiered when it did. Had "300" been released during the early days of the Bush Jr. Iraq invasion, we might have had to bleach theaters in between showings.

Homo-eroticism was also a huge, huge component of the original fascist movements of Italy, Spain, and France, in which hatred of homosexuality was combined with a quite pornographic worship of macho manly warrior bodies and posturing.

So we have the near fascist ultra-reactionary right sharing their obvious warrior homo-eroticism with the center-right pundit class.

And so now the center-right pundit class has a great reason to dismiss any rationality of the center, or the liberals, or (god forbid) the left: it's not "butch" enough for them.

So the way they can justify their pornographic worship of public worship of sadism by fake non-warriors (the Republican debaters' glee for torture, sans actual warrior McCain, & Paul) because they also demonstrate hostility to gay equality.

If the right and center right weren't constantly engaging in an extreme, flamboyant, and ridiculous public passion play of their worship of fake machismo, most of us wouldn't care to discuss it.

We bring it up because the right and their pundit worshippers play a public role, that of the True Admirers of the Warrior Class, and they do it both in the "Kill the Darkies" style and in the "My Doesn't He Come Across To You As Manly and Powerful" style (and its opposite -- "Hey, I Better Keep Giggling About John Edwards Looking Like a Breck Girl and That John Kerry Looks French").

Pointing out how ridiculously contradictory their plays at being El Mas Macho (i.e., which Republican Presidential candidate who isn't a veteran luuuvs torture more and luuuvs Jack Baur), the right's open use of homosexuality as the representative of a degraded culture, and the pundit class' bizarre acceptance of irrational and fake not-warriors like George W. Bush Jr. instead of actual real world warriors...

...this isn't about their psychology or their psychoanalytic background or their anthropological roots.

It's that it's a big public charade which is used in the place of rational debate, and it's that public charade which needs to be punctured.

So when Chris Matthews giggles like a girl at how tough he thinks Daddy Fred Thompson would be with him, I don't really care why Chris Matthews does so, because I don´t like him and I don´t find him interesting.

If I had to guess, it´s because this is Matthews´ best way of helping the charade because what he truly, truly hates is actual liberalism. By aiming to constantly associate liberalism, and in fact reason in general, with unmanliness, with being a not-warrior quality, with being borderline homosexual, the homo-erotic right and their pundit worshippers try to keep a rational political and economic philosophy off of the table.