Archive of entries posted on 25th April 2009

Award!

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NunyaB of Why Sarah Palin Is So Freaking Awesome has honored IMAO with the “Freaking Awesome? You Betcha!” Award.

You ever see that look that nerdy guys get when some totally hot chick asks them what time it is, and their legs start trembling and you can tell they’re wishing that Star Wars was real so that they could use the Jedi Mind Trick on themselves in order to answer the girl’s question in something besides a nervous squeak?

Sarah Palin makes me feel like that ALL THE TIME.

FINE PRINT:

To join the exclusive club of blogs who honor IMAO and have your award featured on our sidebar with a link to your blog, make up a fancy award image honoring IMAO, blog about it, and drop a link in the comments.

Keep it PG-13, and if it doesn’t suck too terribly bad, your award will be duly noted in a post (Current estimated wait time – 6 Award posts), and placed in the sidebar with a link to your site.

As added incentive for people to honor IMAO with worthless, made-up awards, those who do so may proudly display this worthless, made-up Participant Ribbon:

If you don’t have a blog, then send your image to harvolson-at-gmail.com and include a link to one of your favorite IMAO posts.

For the Photoshop-impaired, here’s a guide to making mediocre fake pictures with Microsoft Paint

Or try the free lolbuilder from I Can Has Cheezburger.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Maximum sidebar image width is 190 pixels. Please make sure text is at least barely legible at that size.

Now get honoring!

The Church of Obama

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Let’s get serious for a minute.

ABC News reports that CIA agents that the Obama administration doesn’t give them the support they need to do their job:

“We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they’ve been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong,” (Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production) says. “They don’t believe they have that cover anymore.”

This is important. Very important.

Back in the 1970s, in the post-Watergate era, the Democrats overreacted to everything. They hated Richard Nixon — to a degree not seen until their hate of George W. Bush. And they were going to wreak vengeance, no matter the cost.

It cost us a lot.

I remember it well. I recall when Idaho Senator Frank Church chaired a committee (the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) that effectively gutted the U.S. intelligence community.

One of the effects of the Church Committee was a drop in morale in the intelligence community.

Being a spy — a field agent — isn’t all James Bond. It’s not any James Bond. It’s mostly being where you don’t want to be, with people you don’t want to be with, risking imprisonment or death if exposed.

But, knowing you have the support of your country helps.

After the Church Committee, many felt they didn’t have that support.

Couple that with the restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies, and suddenly it’s very hard to do the job.

What could go wrong?

Well, for one thing, the CIA could be caught flatfooted should the government of a friendly nation be suddenly overthrown by Islamic radicals. Such as happened in Iran in 1979.

Think about that one event. Had we seen it coming, could we have prevented it? Maybe. And imagine the world today had the Islamic Revolution not happened.

The intelligence community still hasn’t recovered. Though morale is better, many of the restrictions still in place have made it hard for intelligence to be verified to the proper degree. It’s never easy, but the restrictions make it harder.

Credit goes to Frank Church for the situation today.

And we’re about to have part two of that whole situation.

The Obama administration is poised to hang CIA agents out to dry.

Look for a drop in morale in intelligence agencies.

And look for Congressional committees to “clean up” the intelligence community.

Then look for something to happen because of a failure of the intelligence community, because of the agents not being able to do their job.

Frank Church hurt this country greatly with his committee’s work that hurt our spies. And he was a Senator.

Imagine what damage the current president will do.