a coincidence theorists' guide to real paranoia

Making a department out of homeland security may well be the final victory of stupid criminality over intelligent probity. In the ongoing battle between mainstream coincidence theorists and us nutty conspiracy theorists, it's time to up the ante. We literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain by copping this attitude, and John Dean leads the way.

On why impeachment is off the table:

With forty-nine senators of the 110th Congress members in good standing with the Republican Party, and most of them rock-ribbed conservatives, even if the House produced evidence of Cheney personally water-boarding "Gitmo" detainees in the basement of his home at the Naval Observatory, with Bush looking on approvingly, there are more than thirty-three GOP Senators who still would not vote to convict. (Senate Republicans who have no problem with torture, or with removing the right to habeas corpus, and who refused to exercise any oversight whatsoever of Bush or Cheney, are hardly going to remove these men for actions in which they too are complicit.)

And so he proposes, with attitude, that we impeach cabinet members instead. His argument is airtight. Let's start with Chertoff, and replace him with someone who will help Congress dismantle this travesty of an administrative department.

Our sensibilities have been smacked upside our own heads like two-by-fours so many times in the last six years that it's become dull. There is no movement. No progress. No rising from it. Things are too dull in this cruel world, so I'm just gonna start rocking out, free associating, venting miscellany from under my heavy-duty tinfoil hat. So should you. The uncivilized realities of Third Millennium life in these United States need to be met with real creativity and powerful allegiance to decency. We're bogged down, and we need to give air to our hearts and minds.

Somebody at the ABA please reinstate John Dean. He has more than made up for his youthful mistakes.

My eyeballs have turned into raisins over the past few days in the process of fathoming a particularly agonizing PDF in the matter of the House of Death case. I'm working toward exposition of the vexing performance of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), an arm of this technologically advanced and devolved-to-outright-stupid new government department -- which somehow, and alarmingly, manages to solve some people's problems in elegantly evil ways, despite the hallmark doltishness of those who people its ranks. As you may already know, I can't research this stuff without experiencing it right here at my desk. So my mind is still riddled with the souls offended in the House of Death case, while boxing my way out of this outrage-overload induced stupor.

And I want to keep snooping, but I only find out The Engineer, a ranking stone cold murderating drug cartel henchman against whom ICE had entirely too much evidence, cops a plea for generally skunkish mayhem and gets 25 years, without leaving us access to the particulars of his crimes and connections. One stand-up kind of skunk. And Lalo, he of many names, turns out to be implicating Vicente Fox in this apocalyptic mess while fighting deportation for having been The Engineer's associate murderating skunk/snitch.

Dear friend to our administration, Vicente Fox! Great!

Which begins to make me crazy all over again. Which makes me -- still at least half fly on Sandy's (Sandalio Gonzalez) wall -- start freaking about how many people have been dying, and how many of my coworkers have been scared out of their wits on top of risking their lives to stop this action. Splits my personality in two. Harks up all the years I spent defending cops in the vast array of truly idiotic and frequently frightening picklements in which they do regularly find themselves. Is pitted against an antipathy formed by hearing of old hippies who were trying to put their kids through college with their dope patches being held at gunpoint while those college educations were being ripped out of the ground. It happens to me every time I turn around. In recent years I have found myself forgiving the CIA all its sins -- lost in the righteousness of Valerie Plame Wilson and her White Knight husband -- only to start suspecting it of more egregious ones. Same with the FBI. One minute they are helping me foil tree murdering banking fraud artists, and the next they're messing with Sibel Edmonds, and our country, in a big way. Same with the increasing nazification of my beloved California peace officers. Sometimes I'm just desperate to get up and knock all their blocks off, but the truth seems to be that there are seriously dedicated, honest patriots in all these organizations. KAOS has ripped the control from CONTROL is all. We gotta Get Smart here pretty soon or we're just toast.

No, really! Read John Dean's latest. It's a shot in the arm for all of us, after we get over the agony of knowing we must swallow our revenge lust in favor of applying wisdom with alacrity. Just do it. Get it behind you so attitude will out.

I'm asking myself how come The Engineer just goes to prison, but Lalo is having to fight deportation. Could it be that decent people within the alphabet soup didn't want Lalo being locked up with no way to trace what the heck he did and knew and could tell us about? Someone in law enforcement got a gander at how neatly The Engineer had been tucked away without leaving tracks for the prosecution of a dazzling array of criminals large and small? Is there a damn tug-of-war going on within our government for decency to somehow prevail over all this filth that has, clearly, been holding the day for entirely exasperatingly much longer than even the nitwit coincidence theorists among us can even stand? John Dean's piece begins to look prettier by the minute.

I'm reeling from finding out that US Customs, along with the Border Patrol and INS, have been folded into DHS, AND they have emerged in this new skin as CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), along with a bunch of other things that need to operate smoothly and competently, and don't just now. Of course they don't! The whole department was set up by criminals through the offices of a sub-intellectual drunk sociopath who is holding Barney hostage in the White House. Feast your eyes on it. Read it and weep. Oh. My. God. It's as if they're taking everything upon which they want tight control, turning all of the agencies into enforcement and intelligence and examination and investigation offices (E-I-E-I-O's). Old MacDonald has bought the farm.

It's been creeping me out for quite a while that the Secret Service was moved there. The protection of presidents and former presidents, et cetera, has been moved from the long-entrenched safety of the Treasury Department. The service with extremely high and exacting standards, once thought inviolable, has been put into the service of criminals. Do I have to spell out what that means? Only one feature of this is that a bungler can really easily be made to seem as if he's an evil genius, or vice versa. Any American with benefit of a grade school civics lesson under their belt will not have any idea how to separate one from the other, and can be relied upon to default to the idea that bungling is what's holding the day. Perfect.

No, really! Read John Dean.

A glance at ICE's public face seems to tell one that there is very little they do not cover. If it seems to be missing, they probably just haven't gotten to it yet. And, don't worry, it's somewhere else under the DHS umbrella anyway. ICE's specialty seems to be: Doing whatever the administration tells them. What do you call those? Henchmen? What if Lalo, who had been recruited as a US Customs informant before it became ICE under the umbrella of DHS, was aiding in the currently fashionable practice of manufacturing threats to thwart, being allowed to conduct his drug trafficking operations unmolested in exchange for setting up patsies to make ICE agents look righteous? DHS wants to seem indispensable, not omitting trampling all over other agencies in furtherance of this goal. What if Lalo's gig has been throwing felons with whom Mexican drug traffickers are fed up to ICE? What if he was a gift to us from a foxy someone whose unimpeded War-on-Drugs-profiteering must not ever be impeded? ICE would be acting like ICE has been acting for certain then.

Is anybody getting my drift? No, really! Read John Dean. Set aside the inescapable fact that we are bound by the Constitution to impeach these fiends in the White House, and have been for years and years, because it has been set aside for years and years. If there will be no way to induce them to do their duty in this respect, John Dean has a positive plan that could help a lot.

It's a way whistle-blowers get heard.

It's a way to get ice off the wire.