TOBY PETZOLD

Thomas Joscelyn helps us follow the money with this Mary O. McCarthy dame, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency —and a dear personal friend of Dana Priest:

3/14/2004 $2,000 Kerry Campaign

10/5/2004 $5,000 Democratic Party of Ohio

10/29/2004 $500 DNC

$7,500 during a presidential election year. Not bad.

What is it with CIA agents making financial donations to Democratic causes —and then leaking information to the press intended to harm the Republicans and our national security?

Must be the New Patriotism.

Bluto at The Jawa Report has this post on Washington Post executive editor Len Downie and where he stands on the Mary O. McCarthy firing. First, from the Post itself:

Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not “come to harm for that.”

Then Bluto:

Now, think about that. Downie is actually advocating trying to run a government in which not a single bit of data can reasonably be expected to remain confidential. Downie doesn’t explain what disclosures match his criteria for “holding their government accountable”. Evidently, those determinations are up to any of the hundreds of thousands of government employees who are privy to classified information.

An important part of growing up in America is realizing that you don’t have a God-given right to know every fucking thing your government is doing at all times and right now. Some people mistake the ability to disseminate important intelligence with their right to free expression (or, as the miserable asshole Joe Wilson puts it, the “right as a citizen of this country to participate in the selection of my leaders”). When these people are officers of the United States intelligence community, they undermine our country’s security for partisan advantage.

Enjoy your Pulitzer Prize, Ms. Priest. You and McCarthy certainly earned it.

Hmmm. I just keep on winning.

What better way of showing our solidarity with democratic movements around the world than to countenance this sort of nonsense?

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A woman accused of heckling Chinese President Hu Jintao during a White House appearance was charged Friday with a misdemeanor of willfully intimidating, coercing, threatening and harassing a foreign official.

Wang Wenyi, 47, had press credentials as a reporter for a Falun Gong newspaper and positioned herself Thursday in front of the platform where President Bush and Hu stood.

According to Secret Service translations in court documents, she shouted in Chinese, “Stop oppressing the Falun Gong,” among other remarks.

If convicted, she could receive up to 6 months in jail and a $5,000 fine.

Then again, as the out-party always says, this is a nation of laws.

True to his mission, Duncan Black banned me this morning after a single comment.

One that criticized Valerie Plame and her pimp.

The only conclusion I can draw is that Black is on their Christmas card list.

This is what the anti-Bush Left wanted, isn’t it?

WASHINGTON - In a rare occurrence, the CIA fired an officer who acknowledged giving classified information to a reporter, NBC News learned Friday.

The officer flunked a polygraph exam before being fired on Thursday and is now under investigation by the Justice Department, NBC has learned.

Intelligence sources tell NBC News the accused officer, Mary McCarthy, worked in the CIA’s inspector general’s office and had worked for the National Security Council under the Clinton and and George W. Bush administrations.

The leak pertained to stories on the CIA’s rumored secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sources told NBC. The information was allegedly provided to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who wrote about CIA prisons in November and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for her reporting.

I question the timing.

Today was the 170th anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto.

The following is inscribed on the great monument that consecrates that field:

Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.

Long Live Texas!

Does anyone know if Eason Jordan is doing consulting work for Google in China?

I hope I don’t go black.

Want to get a sense of how hateful my Leftist friends can be? This post and thread at Eschaton is a good place to start.

Hold your nose!

A commenter at Eschaton named Phila says that he, unlike many of his anti-war friends who never gave a damn about human rights abuses in Saddamite Iraq, was in support of the 1988 Prevention of Genocide Act (see here, too).

I don’t think I even knew about that Act (not incidentally, one that was never passed), but upon reading through it, one is struck by its futility. We were still using Iraq as a tool against Iran in those days and had not yet transitioned over to the posture that we would assume a few years later during the Gulf War. The Act was full of economic measures and, vaguely, the threat of military action, but nothing would come of it because the logic of the Cold War was still in effect: containment, triangulation, and no nation-building.

We have had our sights set on Iraq for a very long time now.

In going to war for Iraq, Bush the Younger was only the decider.