The Double Government. Who's Really In Control?

[SomethingFishy]

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/11/double-government-secret-gets-out

Via The Boston Globe, the secret is out: there’s a whole second government residing in the American national security apparatus that’s powerful enough to resist presidential orders.

You know something is going on when the cautious Boston Globe publishes not one, but two, pieces dealing with the “double government.”

This cryptic phrase encapsulates a serious claim about the American body politic: That a permanent and largely unaccountable bureaucracy keeps on doing what it wants to do, no matter who the voters elect to the White House.

Both of the Globe articles refer to “National Security and Double Government,” a book by Michael J. Glennon, professor of international law at Tufts University. From the descriptions of its contents (we haven’t read the book yet, but we will—and perhaps excerpt), the author is talking, with due academic caution, about an out-of-control security/military apparatus...

Lots more at the link.

And just let me say "Fucking Snowden and Greenwald, this is all their fault..

[tk2kewl]

1. “The ultimate problem..."

“The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions,” [Glennon] told theGlobe.

[SomethingFishy]

3. That "indifference" runs deep, even in liberals..

If you even mention a shadow government you are labeled a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Many of us knew long ago... Bill Hicks used to do this bit about how when you get elected President they take you to a secret room and show you film of the Kennedy assassination in slow motion over and over till you understand who is actually in charge...


Even this thread... only one response..

[myohmy2]

2. "Who's Really In Control?"

....cheney?....seriously, if we ever made it to the inner circle of the shadow government bus, we'd probably find cheney at the wheel; or damn close to it....

[SomethingFishy]

4. Yup... and probably Rumsfeld too.. he left way too easily..

for a guy who loved his power..

[truedelphi]

5. Thank you for this OP.

People constantly wonder how the Third reich managed to stay in power.

Well, the people in power back then made sure that nothing was even discussed. (So let's say you lived back in the 1930's in Germany, and you had concerns and fears that your neighbors who are Jewish might not be working merrily in a pleasant camp as portrayed in the government's documentary on camp life, but how could you really tell? Who could you ask? If you mention your concerns to a neighbor or a friend, and although they didn't say, "My, you have your tin foil hat on today," there were equivalent expressions of how the neighbor or relative "Cluck, clucked" at you till you shut up.)

Here in 2014 "America" many of us can't say out loud what we know is happening. Unless willing to assume a tinfoil hat, for instance, I can't say why I think the Calif. drought is man made, and by "man made" I don't mean by that that we middle class folks are guilty of Global Warming. I mean something relating to a fleet of planes that are not in my skies three days before Christmas, but always appear 72 hours before a major storm system should hit my area. And then that storm system dries up...)

Even mentioning a fondness for the US Constitution can get you labeled a "conspiracy theorist."

And I will say this again, although again people here may again possibly mis-construe what I am saying, in Germany in the 1930's, the middle class was in ascendancy, so they traded their freedoms for SOMETHING. Among items that came the way of the average, non-Jewish, non-Union leader, household, here ar some benefits attained: Including not having to get up from their cafe seat every time a "Herr PRofessor" entered said cafe. Including a NAtional Health Program that took care of all costs. And including the ability to hold down a job, and to have a two week vacation.

Here in America we are trading our freedom away for very little. Oh there are some things we get if we Shut the Fuck up! Among them, the ability to have cable TV with lots of vampire TV shows, while we live on food stamps, and then we swap our liberties away for the ability to have our kids go off to some third world place, (or some government installation in Nevada that has installed a "drone dungeon,)" so our kids may possibly someday have the money to go to college, as long as they first wage war on people who are guilty only of not living in the USA.

[SomethingFishy]

6. You are quite welcome.. but the thanks should go to the Boston Globe

who actually had the guts to print this story and give it some legitimacy..

I'm in a total funk today, after reading this and Tiabbi's new piece, I have little hope for a turnaround...