BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Privacy is over-rated.
We say we want our privacy, but we really don’t care that much about it. The government wants the privacy to invade our privacy in order to sniff out terrorists. Despite the best efforts of Rand Paul and the ACLU, most Americans are just fine with that.
Polls show that when there is a competition between privacy and security, the American people pick security every time. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
The Boston attacks will have an inevitable, if unpredictable, impact on the debates in Washington D.C.
We now know that the perpetrators were legal residents, that they were Muslim, that they were Chechen, that they were pretty young. We know the older one was disaffected and unhappy with living in America. We know he was radicalized to become anti-American.
We surmise that the younger one was less radical but perhaps more prone to being influenced by his big brother. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Season Three of Homeland might debut in September on Showtime, but on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and all of the other networks, Homeland season three debuted last night.
Talk about reality and fantasy merging together.
Some might have thought that the television series starring Damian Lewis and Clare Danes and the always entertaining Mandy Pantinkin had already jumped the shark. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Originally published on October 16, 2002, 13 months after the 9/11 attacks.
The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines the word “civilization” thus: An ideal state of human culture characterized by complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior.
In the United States, we pretend to live our entire lives in a constant “State of Positive Assumptions.” The central assumption is we DO live in a country “characterized by complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior.” Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Here we go again.
On my morning walk with my dog I saw the Capitol Police friend of mine. We both shook our heads at the events that happened in Boston. Here we go again, we both said.
More overtime is in the future for him. More insecurity for me and my family.
We don’t know who set off the bombs in Boston. It could have been a Saudi National. That was the early speculation. It could have been a home-grown Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The leaks of classified information from the Obama Administration in recent weeks raise the specter of a Watergate scandal and lessons not learned.
There have been at least five different incidents in which it appears people in the White House or the Obama Administration, or people with their sanction, have leaked highly classified information to the media, presumably to make Obama look tough on terrorism.
Each incident has its own set of dubious circumstances. Each has its own disturbing story of compromised national security, the endangerment of professionals in clandestine services, the abuse and betrayal of our friends and allies, and the abuse of the White House and other government offices for partisan advantage.
The five latest incidents were: Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from the Feeherytheory.com
Here is an essay about how my day went on September 11th.
It was a clear, crisp September morning, the kind of day that makes Washington a glorious place to live in the Fall. I woke up later than I wanted to, knowing that I had to take care of two things: The Speaker’s Daily news summary and my NFL football pool sheet.
We were a week past the August recess, and I still hadn’t gotten into the old work routine. In my mind, I will still on recess time. Usually I wanted to stop by Starbucks on my way to work, but I was running too late. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Note: On September 14, 2001 President Bush went to Ground Zero. Standing atop a buried fire truck the President draped an arm over a firefighter wearing a helmet bearing the number “164.” Talking through a bullhorn, President Bush began addressing the rescue workers. When someone shouted that they couldn’t hear him, the President responded:
“I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
I went through a good deal of what I wrote during the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I’ve chosen to reprise this column because it was, unfortunately, prescient in the way it portrays the ways wars start and the ways war ends. I know you may be suffering from 9/11 fatigue, but I hope you’ll spend a few minutes and re-read this column from nearly 10 years ago:
Wars start with old men telling young men there is a great cause. Young men run tell their young women they are answering the call. Continue reading