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I love the smell of raked muck in the morning!
Of course, I'm perpetually grinding what's left of my teeth at the nefarious Byzantine interrelationships between government, civil and military, and the corporate sector-- including, maybe especially, corporate media.
It's been a long time since my parochial school introduction to New Math, but if I remember Venn Diagram drawing aright, I would draw these domains as nearly overlapping circles-- with a bare crescent on the margins inhabited by rogues like Barstow and, say, Bunnatine Greenhouse.
It's no surprise that accomplished infotainwhores like Williams and McCaffrey remain evasive and disingenuous about their sordid professional relationship, and the ethical and epistemological fault lines upon which it's based. My felt intuition is that in our debased and mendacious culture, persons who reach the elite ranks of these professions truly come to consider themselves superior beings, intellectually and morally.
If their brains were soaked in sodium pentothal, and these men were transported in restraints to be interviewed (interrogated) at length by Glenn on Salon Radio, I expect that ultimately they'd spit out a diatribe not unlike Jack Nicholson's Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in "A Few Good Men"-- that is, they might finally admit that there's something superficially untoward about the way they operate, and that they're handsomely rewarded for their efforts-- but they would superciliously insist that they're proven persons of outstanding character and patriotism, and that what they do is necessary to ensure that our Leaders accomplish their missions in order to keep the rest of us safe and free.
Put more simply, my guess is that they really think that their business is none of our business-- but that, in any case, they are entitled to be unconditionally respected and trusted that they are, at bottom, acting in the interests of the greater good.
