Does Anyone Remember Valerie Plame?

The ACLU is outing CIA operatives right and left SEE HERE— so where are all the investigative journalists crying "foul"? The double standard in journalism is chilling. If Fox news didn't exist we'd have nothing but an Obama cheering section as the republic was disassembled.

Weep for the death of the republic. When I was in school I read the classic Latin texts. My generation may have been one of the last to have four years of Latin reading Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil and acquiring an appreciation for the Roman Republic and a sense of the sheer sweep of tyranny represented by the rise of the Empire as Emperor followed Emperor often based on how much they could promise the Roman legions.

Our Founding Fathers understood this but we no longer do because the Western Tradition has been eradicated from our schools. "Ho Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go" chanted the mindless undergraduates of the 1960s as they advanced Maoist ideas and agitated in response to encouragement by those who favored the eradication of the infant Vietnamese democracy.

We were implicated in the assassination of Diem and it seemed odd to me, and still does, that that assassination came only shortly before John Kennedy was assassinated. But that's another time and another tyranny. The one we are seeing today is the assault on the American republic from within. It is a highly organized and orchestrated assault. That is apparent because it is so focused and intense. I do not know if it will be successful, but it seems certain that it is underway.

The picture is by Picasso of a weeping woman. I don't know the history of the picture. It dates apparently from 1937 when the Nazis were already securely in power. Perhaps it is weeping over the Spanish Civil War. I put it up because I think it is symbolic of sorrow. If we lose this republic of ours — the res publica (the public thing) in the Latin, then the great Darkness will be beginning once again.

The Darkness always falls when tyranny stalks the land. I suppose I sound like a very gloomy person, but in fact I am an obsessively cheerful person always rising with a smile on my face and full of good cheer, hearty fellow well met I suppose. So I am not motivated by a gloomy drearyness or a tendency to depression, instead it is a particular historical awareness of the fall of the ancient Roman res publica and the rise of Fascism and National Socialism in the aftermath of the Great War. Communism rose out of that same war. All were motivated by a Utopian fever. It would be ironic if the richest and most hopeful nation in the world were brought down by those who were still seeking those false Gods. But it is hard not to think in light of current events that that might well be exactly what we are watching.