Drive-By

JUST in case there's anyone out there demanding to know when The Left will denounce the Obama administration's flagrant manipulation of Terror in order to deflect attention away from the looming NEA scandal, let us note, first, that The Left doesn't want anything to do with us, excepting the Wonkette comments section, and we miss him. And, second, that someone ought to step up, seeing how widespread the skepticism on the Right was whenever the Bush administration upped the Terra Alert Level for political gain. Okay, so at least they were widely skeptical when Tom Ridge admitted it. Which must count for something.

Anyway, okay. Acts of the Justice Department ought to be considered politically motivated, except where a supermajority of rational people agree that one most likely isn't. Provided we keep that as the standard, mmmkay?

But having said that, let's further stipulate that if this sort of thing causes Teabag-Americans to shut th' fuck up long enough to run off and mess themselves, then the Obama administration ought to make it a regular feature, and what took you so long? COINTELPRO ran for fifteen years, and that's if you believe the official timeline; we said we quit making weaponized anthrax in 1972, too. It seems like this ought to be the political equivalent of the defense jumping offsides: offense gets a free play. It could even be accomplished--this time--without violating anybody's rights, although I realize that takes at least half the fun out of it for some people. Just pay swarthy-looking guys to pretend to plot to blow up the Sears Tower or the Transamerica Building or the Mall of America, and whisk them off to the Bahamas for future questioning. Everybody wins.

But speaking of which:

1) An agent of SPECTRE is $50,000 in debt? Wow, this recession's hit everybody.

2) They're charged with making false statements? Okay, so call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but shouldn't "lying to the cops" be legal so long as "lying to suspects" is?

3) If you've got bomb-making instructions on your laptop, then my first impression is that your al-Qaeda training wasn't strenuous enough. I managed to swap out my hard drive by lugging my computer up to my Poor Wife's office so I could watch the instructional video on her machine while working on mine. This makes me a complete idiot who luckily did not fry his iMac, not a computer repair technician.

4) Never pretend you know what's going on inside an investigation by the sort of malarky that is released outside an investigation, but look: the FBI, fighting to keep us all safe in our beds, gets pissed-off enough at an informant (for allegedly tipping off someone he'd fingered) that it doesn't just charge him, which might be a bit of misdirection, but releases his identity out of spite? I think we know where this one's headed.

Oh, almost forgot: handwritten notes "consistent with the suspect's handwriting". But let's not call this one a slam-dunk until the boys from the Phrenology Lab weigh in.