It's time to stop pretending that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not fatally compromised, that it is salvageable, that it has not terminally declined from its glory days of commie-chasing and cross-dressing into a collection of regime toadies eagerly doing its Democrat masters' bidding. GOP, you need to stop equivocating and playing footsie with these mediocrities in bad suits. After you take the House and Senate, refuse to fund the FBI. Not one dime. This must all end.
The FBI has simply outlived its uselessness. It must be shut down, in disgrace, and those duties that remain necessary must be parceled out to existing or new agencies that do not share its shameful legacy. This remedy is harsh, disruptive, even scary – count on the FBI and its friends to not-so-subtly promise retaliation against those trying to turn it off like the astronauts when they tried to pull the plug on HAL 9000. But it has to be done. This cannot go on – every day, the politicized FBI does grave damage to the foundations of American democracy (though we're actually a republic, but whatever).
It's a big ask from a GOP caucus that can't even put together the testicle collection necessary to defund the propaganda arm of the Chardonnay and Volvos set, NPR. For decades we have been pushing the simps and squishes in Congress to get done this bare minimum response to a federally funded airwave adjunct of the Democratic Party. They haven't. But the sissy socialists on the radio are just a mere nuisance, while the FBI is an existential threat to our most basic liberties.
Hey, ho, the FBI has got to go.
There's no redeeming it, no fixing it. It was flawed from the beginning, created by trans-curious thuglette J. Edgar Hoover, and turned into his own personal Stasi. It combined two very different functions, law enforcement and counter-intelligence, into one barely accountable department. Other countries don't do that. In the UK, Scotland Yard chases crooks and MI5 chases terrorists and spies. By mixing these functions, it was almost inevitable that the FBI's surveillance and spying capabilities would be mixed with the prosecutorial capabilities and it would become a corrupt tool to maintain the power of its favorites. And it has.
If only we could harness the clean energy power generated by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., spinning in his grave over the corrupt sham that the Bureau has become. Once Inspector Erskine chased bank robbers and commies. Remember Clarice Starling pitting her mind against Hannibal Lector? No institution got fluffed like the FBI, and we bought it. When one of those starched and combed FBI types took the stand, juries swooned. Why, if the FBI was saying it, it had to be the truth!
But the truth is its vaunted crime lab was faking results. Its Boston division was bought by Whitey Bulger and one of its agents went away for murder. Gee, Trump might have been keeping secret nuke papers in Melania's undies drawer? How about Robert Hansen, whose spying for the Russians was hailed as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history?" It only took the Bureau a couple of decades to find the guy in their own office who literally gave the Russians every double agent in its ranks, but these gumshoes are all over that nefarious Trump!
And then there's Waco and Ruby Ridge.
And say, how's that Las Vegas investigation going? And what is with knowing about the 9/11 hijackers and pretty much every school shooter?
And what gives with framing some near-homeless ne'er-do-wells for trying to kidnap the Stepford gov?
And faking warrants based on a fake dossier?
But hey, if you took a selfie on J6, the FBI is all over you.
The GOP Congress must put the FBI out of our misery, the misery of normal Americans tired of incompetence and paying for a coterie of over-praised political hatchet-men doing the ruling caste's dirty work. But will the GOP generate the stones to do it?
There is a faction within the Republican Party of people who desperately want to return to something like normalcy, and their problem is that they do not want to do it the right way. The right way is to ruthlessly excise those things that have broken our norms and allowed this abnormal moment to persist. In their minds, that itself breaks the norms, but they are so very wrong. To enforce the norms, the norms must be enforced – a tautology, but a true one.
They would continue to pretend that all is well, that everything is fine, that the house is not burning down and it's only hot in here because of global warming. But that's not so. It is not normal to have a government organization of people with guns doing the political bidding of one party's political leaders. In fact, nothing could be less normal. Ending the FBI's reign of error is the duty of the GOP; if you want normalcy, you need norms, and if you want to keep the norms you need to enforce them. The FBI has earned ignominious disbandment. Let's not sugar-coat it. Let's not pretend that it is a barrel just bursting with good apples. It has broken faith with the American people, and it is time to consign it to the dustbin of history.
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