or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
May 11, 2007
Further Strategic Insights From George Tenet
From Tenet's new book, p. 14:
During the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that we had won the cold war and it was time to reap the peace dividend. Not only was that assumption wrong—the war was simply evolving from state-run to stateless armies and from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to nuclear manpacks and anthrax vials—but the supposed "peace dividend" was devastating to the spy business...
Yes—the conventional wisdom is that the North won the Civil War. But in fact the war was simply evolving...INTO WORLD WAR ONE!!!!
Posted at May 11, 2007 07:32 PM | TrackBackMuch as the Boxer Rebellion evolved uncontrollably into the Boer Rebellion. Damn "x"s..
Posted by: spurge at May 11, 2007 07:46 PMI'll give him points for honesty, at least. Because it certainly sounds like the "war" is the security state vs. the popular will, and the latest weapon of the bureaucracy is Terrorism.
Taken literally, of course, he's a complete moron.
Posted by: James Cape at May 11, 2007 07:58 PMI think he nailed it - it is a gimmick for the US taxpayers to keep handing over tons of money to those idiots who run the CIA and DOD. If we just left others alone, they would likely leave us alone too.
Then we can worry about fixing levees, curing cancer and reducing traffic deaths. You know, stuff that is really a potential treat to my upcoming non-existance.
Posted by: Susan at May 11, 2007 08:05 PMoh, and upcoming non-existence is guaranteed anyway.
we all die one day.
Posted by: Susan at May 11, 2007 08:06 PMso...Boris Yeltsin was the mastermind behind al Qaeda, and he drank to forget?
Posted by: Jonathan Versen at May 11, 2007 11:19 PMOf course! President Ulysses S. Grant was the great, great grandfather of Boris Yeltzsin, a little known fact, but you know they both liked to drink so there. It is all true exactly as I stated it.
Posted by: rob payne at May 12, 2007 01:22 AMShorter George Tenet: After the end of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was searching for a new threat to justify its existence, but we were too dumb to notice that guerilla insurgencies and hypothetical acts of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction could constitute the threat we were looking for.
Posted by: Gag Halfrunt at May 12, 2007 06:05 AMWait, is he blaming Clinton? Awesome!
Posted by: hedgehog at May 12, 2007 12:39 PMHey George! I got some nuclear man pack for you!
Sorry, everybody, my inner junior high brat couldn't resist.
Posted by: Rojo at May 12, 2007 04:05 PMIf we look at the surrender at Appomattox as the end of Phase I of the Civil War (kind of like the "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier speech) and consider the outcome of the Reconstruction - then yeah, the South DID win. And they're still more-or-less in charge, especially when you add in the fact that the Christianists have taken over the Air Force, and they're the guys with the nuclear weapons.
Happy Mother's Day, everyone.
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. at May 13, 2007 12:41 PMYes, the South lost the war but it won the peace.
I've read that there are so many Southerners in the US armed forces that children from military families, no matter where they live (as long as it's on-base), grow up saying y'all.
Posted by: Gag Halfrunt at May 13, 2007 01:01 PMShorter Tenet (or shorter Gag Halfrunt): We are at war with Eastasia; we've always been at war with Eastasia.
More evidence that, in DC, "1984" is viewed as a manual rather than a cautionary novel.
