No Puppet, You’re the Puppet

This is the fairy story of a tangerine puppet.

~~ “Tangerine Puppet” by Donovan

He said he didn’t meddle. He said he didn’t meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.' And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.

~~ The President* of the United States

There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever.

~~ James Comey

Master of Puppets

Today we had the pleasure of hearing were subjected to the current Resident of the People’s House telling the world that he believes a former KGB Colonel over America’s Intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the DIA, and the CIA. He specifically called out certain directors of these agencies, including James Clapper, John Brennan, and dear James Comey as being “political hacks.” He did this while overseas on his big Asia trip. He demeaned, disparaged, and defamed our Intelligence agencies while on foreign soil.

Over the past year, he has done plenty of things to disgust and enrage me. This is among the worst things he’s done.

To begin with...Vladimir Putin? Seriously? This is not a nice guy, he does not want to play nice with America, and he does not do nice things to people who oppose him. He is the definition of NOT NICE. He was not a nice person when he was in the KGB and he is not a nice person now. What is this strange obsession that the Resident has with Putin? Why does he toady up to him? I’m not a psychiatrist and I don’t play one on TV, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would see it as a dominance/submission thing. The Resident knows that Putin is the stronger and more dominant personality and so he instinctively wants to curry favor with him. He longs for the approval he can get from pleasing the more dominant personality. To go a little further, I’d be willing to bet that it stems from his father issues. By all accounts, his father was a distant, domineering figure who offered little in the way of love or empathy to his son. So he instinctively cowers before someone who is more dominant.

Or maybe he’s just a big jerk! That’s a distinct possibility.

But what really burns my bacon is that the Resident is going after our Intelligence Community. I’ll be the first to admit that they make mistakes and need to be committed to working on identifying those mistakes and working on them. I believe that they generally try to do that.

I believe ^THIS^ guy.

These are devoted men and women who work diligently to find those who would do us harm and to stop them from doing it. They put their lives on the line to catch the Bad Guys and I am grateful for them. I wonder how many attacks they have stopped and how many lives they have saved?

It strikes me that the Intelligence Community is the vaccines of the political world. By that, I mean that they are victims of their own success. Vaccines work behind the scenes with little fanfare. Vaccines save lives. But people get complacent. “Oh, no one gets measles anymore. No one gets whooping cough anymore. I don’t need to get my kid vaccinated.” You know why you don’t see a lot of measles or whooping cough anymore? Because VACCINES, you tool! So because vaccines have been so successful in preventing these infectious diseases, you think that there is no risk of your kid getting one of them. That is horribly wrong, and we are seeing far too many results of outbreaks due to this kind of mistaken thinking.

How is the IC similar? They are also victims of their own success. They work behind the scenes to ferret out those who want to hurt us. They save lives by finding these plots and stopping them. We get complacent and say, “Oh, we haven’t had a big terrorist attack in years. We need to curtail the Intelligence agencies and we can even cut their budgets. They don’t have that much to do now.” You know why we haven’t had a big terrorist attack along the lines of 9/11? Because of the INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, you tool! They are working to protect us every damn day, often at the risk of their own lives. They don’t crow a lot about their successes, probably because if we knew how many attacks they have thwarted, we’d have a hard time sleeping at night. Sometimes I wonder how they do. Their work has to take an incredible toll on them personally, emotionally, and probably physically. Yet they do this to keep America safe.

So when I hear the Resident saying that he believes Putin over these hard-working Americans who are devoted to keeping our country safe, I just want to flip the table over and rage against the machine. His comments are horrible and absurd and have no basis in fact. Talk about a useful idiot.

And Brennan, Clapper, and Comey are “political hacks?”

I know a political hack when I see one. And they ain’t it.