No wonder the intelligence community is pissed with Bush the lesser, he has managed to do what few other Presidents were able to do and cripple the CIA.

Between the beating it took for taking the responsibility for Bush's lies to get us into the war and Tenet falling on his sword, the CIA is getting pounded like a $2 whore on payday. Their intelligence effort is being replaced by inside think tanks run by the military and the administration.

If a high-level analyst can be outed on a whim with nobody getting as much as a hair mussed (no pun intended, Rove), what security does the rank-and-file have, and what kind of message does that send to foreign covert operators and cover organizations?

This does not even address the significant impact that one disclosure had on the support infrastructure of her operations, now all rendered crap by the traitors that betrayed her name. The other agents and analysts who had also used those assets to maintain cover are also blown. That bastard traitor asshole wastrel.

All that intelligence effort has to be built all over again, at a significant cost to us. All those agents and analysts have to scamble to put their lives back together. (And let's hope none of her people are in dangerous places.) Since she was a analyst specializing in WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, that means her job was a strategic priority for the defense of the United States of America, and therefore important.

That is, unless Bush the squandering fathead President pulls yet another lie out of his ass and convinces the sheeple yet again that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and that WMDs are no longer important, like Osama Bin Laden. (Bush should be impeached for reneging on that promise alone, much less all the other shit he has done to our country.)

As it is, Plame's cover is blown, and somebody in the Bush administration did it. If you don't like it, ask the President why he lied to us.

You know how you wake up in the middle of the night after an argument and think, “Why didn’t I say...” Well, it’s the middle of the night, and I just woke up with one of those “Why didn’t I say” moments, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to sleep until I get it off my chest.

The north end of the county, where I lived, was growing fast. New houses going up everywhere, and the school district scrambling to build new schools to keep up. The south end of the county, where I worked, was not becoming any less densely populated, but the population was aging so that there were fewer students in the schools. The numbers had dropped within our school boundaries to the point that we were going to have to give up two teachers - a science teacher and an English teacher. Two teachers would have to be transferred to north-end schools.

I liked my school. I liked the students, I liked the principal, and I liked my colleagues. But I hated the commute. When I’d gotten this job, housing was more expensive on the south end of the county, so I’d ended up buying a house at the other end. I’d told myself that in a year or two, I’d switch to a school closer to home so I wouldn’t have to drive so far. But, like I said, I liked my school, and I’d been making that long, grim drive for nine years. And the traffic got worse every year. What had been a 30-minute drive my first year was now (on good days) a 45-minute drive. On bad days, snowy days, rainy days, icy days, days when there was an accident on the freeway, that 45 minutes could stretch into hours. So I took a deep breath and volunteered. “I’ll go.”

So over the next months, I dutifully dressed up, put on my earnest face and interviewed with various schools on the north end. I was hired and was in the process of saying good-bye to the old, getting ready for the new which would begin next fall. And then, a couple of weeks before school let out for the summer, my principal called me into his office. He looked a bit shocked.

As I mentioned before, we were scheduled for two involuntary transfers, a science teacher and an English teacher. But we’d had two English teachers quit voluntarily - one had gone off to make babies, and another had returned to graduate school. And now the District had informed our principal that since I was qualified to teach English, instead of me going north to this other school which had already supposedly hired me, I was to stay put but begin teaching English instead of science.

Nine years of learning to teach science up in smoke. Nine years of lesson plans gone kablooey. Nine years of buying stuff with my own money that would be no good to me as an English teacher. Not to mention that I liked teaching science. Not to mention that I didn’t want to teach English. Not to mention that it was nine years since I’d taken an English class. I was going to be a first-year teacher all over again, and my methods classes wouldn’t even be fresh in my head.

I fought them. My principal fought them. I went to the union, and they turned belly up, the bastards. No wonder Utah has so much trouble getting people to join the union. You pay the dues for nine years, and when you go to them with a problem, they turn up their hands and say, “Gee, that’s too bad.”

A couple of days before the end of school, I was complaining bitterly to a small group of colleagues and friends in the hall after work, and our counseling intern gives me what she apparently thought was a supportive, compassionate look and says, “Well, I know you’ve never liked change.”

Well, all that happened five or six years ago. It took only four years of teaching English to burn me out to the bone. So now I stay home and write Everything2 daylogs, and sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night and think, Why in the HELL didn’t I say, “Oh, and if you complained to me that you had been raped, I suppose I could pat you on the back and say, ‘Well, I know you’ve never liked sex.’”

Holy Cow, I am old-fashioned. What the hey?

What ever happened to the days when the Dude asked for HER number? Seriously. Am I ready for the rocker or something?

He says to my niece, this tall blonde trumpet playin Dude, he says "Hey, give my number to your cousin. She's hot. Tell her to call me." No kidding, he says that. No kidding, I am stunned. I am stunned because the teen girls are taking this as if it were an everyday occurrence. Was there some kind of role switch during my married time period and I missed it? Who changed the rules of the game? I tell her not to call. No Way. She does anyway, because it's no big deal, Mom.

No big deal takes her five attempts to call this person she has never ever had contact with in any shape or form based only on the knowledge he thought "She's hot". No big deal is her pacing saying...What should I say? What should I talk about? HELP ME MOM! Of course I was no help. I had nothing to glean from. How am I supposed to give her advice on what to say to some guy she knows nothing about? I'm the one who thinks HE should be calling HER. That's so old-fashioned

She makes all her squeaks and noises, screws up her face and dials the phone. They have been attached at the hip for weeks and weeks and weeks ever since. I don't get it. I like him, but reeling her in like a fish on a hook? I don't get it. And she plunged onto that hook willingly...

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