Help, I’m being oppressed! My freedom of speech was been utterly stripped from me because when I retired from the Army those fascist monsters took away my TOP SECRET security clearance. See, a security clearance is a special privilege I should be entitled to exploit for as long as I want to because… well, shut up peasant, that’s why. I learned this in my Con Law class, right after we studied the Constitution’s text enumerating the rights to abortion, wedding cake baking servitude, and to be called by the bizarre pronoun of your – I mean “xir” – choice.
Oh wait, all of that – except the giving up my clearance part – is utter nonsense.
But John Brennan, that hack, and his elite pals are supposed to get the special privilege of keeping it. Why? As a professional courtesy. See, security clearances are things you pass out as favors or rewards, I guess, at least among the elite. Courtesy among them, nothing for you, though. You aren’t special. You’re just some guy serving his country and not turning it into a profit center on the outside. Like a sucker.
I got my clearance for the same reason you readers who got one got yours –because I needed it to do my job in the service of our country. And when I stopped needing it because I was no longer doing a job in the service of my country, I didn’t get to keep it to inflate my value as a pundit or “consultant.” Mine went away. As did yours, I’ll wager. The chances are pretty infinitesimal that you are one of the special somebodies who get handed power and privilege not to serve our country but as a perk for being part of the in-crowd.
Being a colonel was just a job for me, and doing what you did was just a job for you. But for a lot of these retired generals and senior bureaucrat timeservers, it’s a lifestyle. I always saw my eagle as leased; they think they hold the pink slip on their positions. Oh, and do they ever have contempt for Normals like you.
Security clearances get pulled routinely when the holder no longer needs access because the fewer people with access, the safer the info is – pretty basic stuff. But hey, we’ll take the chance on classified info spilling if it means elite jerks can get to bask in the warm light of being In The Know. It’s not like any of our betters ever got caught up in classified info shenanigans. Not Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. Not that Towering Doofus James Comey. Not David Petreaus. And not his mistress.
Oh, wait – all of them totally did. But, of course, these elite malefactors are all in jail, because you or I would be if we did what they did. Aren’t they?
Oh, right. They aren’t. They’re special. More professional courtesy. More special rules for special people.
Now, we’re also told that these special somebodies need to keep their clearances in case someone actually in the government who is actually doing a government job (instead of raking in bucks as a “consultant” or pundit) wants to ask their sage advice. How would that go with John Brennan?
“Hey John, it’s Don. Yeah, no hard feelings. Anyway, I needed to pick your brain about some stuff that you have a unique perspective on. So, how do I lie to Congress and get away with it? How about leaking to the liberal media – any pro tips? Oh, and how do I get 30 of our sources in China caught and shot? Yeah, I know you weren’t in charge of the CIA then, but you can tell me how you repaired the damage when you were Director. Oh. You didn’t. Awkward.”
If we had a real media and not the world’s most pompous Democrat transcription service, the CIA’s blown Chinese spy ring disaster would be front page news but hey, Omarosa! In any case, the only consulting anyone should do with the members of this class of unmitigated failures whose incompetence brought us 9/11, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, and a future where we would all be wise to learn Mandarin, is to ask their opinion and then do the opposite – Costanza style.
Let’s look at our elite’s track record of success. Don’t worry – it won’t take long. We’re still chasing bandits in Afghanistan after nearly 17 years, the Navy can’t stop running into other people’s boats, and our best and brightest in the FBI are texting each other like teens while they try to undo the election. They can’t be bothered with things like, I don’t know, following up on warnings about psychotic freaks who get online and announce their plan to shoot up schools. Oh, and remember the 2008 economic collapse? I’m thinking you weren’t the one making bad bets with billions of dollars that brought it all tumbling down. By the way, guess how many people the feds tossed in the pokey for the 2008 meltdown that cost you and me a trillion bucks? One. Uno. A single dude.
If you lifted $50 of Coors Light from a 7-Eleven fridge, where would you be?
Our elite is a failure that is fixated on its own privilege and avoiding accountability. As my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracywonders, is it too much to ask that our elite actually be elite? Is it too much to ask that we have one standard of accountability?
The liberals are right about something – privilege is destroying our country. But it’s not privilege based on what hellhole your great-great-great grandfather escaped from or the kind of biological plumbing you were born with. It is privilege based on your membership in a selfish, feckless, unaccomplished caste of schmucks that fancies itself our betters yet rejects, with the help of a complicit liberal press, any kind of accountability for the mess it’s made of everything.
You know why you got Trump? Because Donald Trump, with all his quirks, is exponentially more competent, capable, and trustworthy when it comes to running this country for the benefit of Normal Americans than the sorry collection of Ivy League-credentialed dimwits, progressive poohbahs, and Fredocon enablers that masquerades as America’s elite.
Pull their security clearances? Yeah, but that’s just a start. Strip them of all of the privileges they haven’t earned, then ship the whole useless bunch of them off to a desert island and see if they can survive eating their own smugness.