Where's the Outrage?

Dissipated in the ozone, or in whatever wispy tendrils remain from the smoke of the smoking gun, that's where. This blockbuster was outrageously easy to miss, mainly because the corporate media chose to miss it:

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before CIA employees were ordered to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands. The conversation with McDonough came after Brennan first issued the directive, but before he reiterated it to a CIA attorney leading the probe.

I wish I could tell you that Attorney General Eric Holder was seeking an immediate indictment against McDonough, Brennan, and even Obama -- who despite his calculated distance from the events, had to have approved the break-in.  At the very least, you'd think that a few congress critters would  proclaim themselves shocked, shocked that the Obama White House was behind a burglary much worse than Watergate. Because not only is breaking and entering into Senate computers a felony, it is a punch in the gut to the Separation of Powers. It is the declaration of unitary executive powers and a tacit admission that we have an imperial presidency. The corruption is complete. Democracy is dead.

Holder. of course, cannot be shocked because he's the guy who wrote the secret opinion allowing Obama to kill people (specifically, American people, because dead "militants"/ foreign people don't count) with his drones. Holder, in one of those Kafkaesque fits of whimsy so popular these days, declared that due process and judicial process are two different things. In other words, it's a reiteration of the Nixon Doctrine: when the president does it, it's not illegal. And finally, Holder announced a long time ago that he wouldn't be investigating the CIA, no doubt knowing that the road to perdition led all the way to President Obama himself.

If this were about President Bush, I think we'd see a tad more outrage from Democrats. But the Obama Personality Cult lives on, against all odds. Normal reaction is impossible in these times of the New Abnormal. Normal reaction is lost in the O-Zone.

There is no outrage at the highest levels of our government-media complex, because they're all complicit in high crimes and misdemeanors. As such, the only reaction trickling down to the citizens is that these revelations will result in less bipartisanship between the good cops and bad cops of the plutocratic duopoly. The Huffington Post, for example, has this take:

The new information suggesting the White House was aware of -- and did not stop -- the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA's computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.

The Oval Office’s prior knowledge of the controversial computer review will no doubt worsen the tensions that have erupted over the matter between the executive branch, its chief intelligence agency and the lawmakers tasked with their oversight.

Wow. If only the partisans could simply relax, everything would be hunky-dory. They just need to get together and spike the Champagne with Valium. So sad that the rulers choose instead to petulantly stew in the status quo their own noxious juices.

Since Temp Emp (autocrat pro tem) Obama is silent, so too shall be the media stenographers, lest their access to the powerful be adversely affected. (They've obligingly downgraded illegal domestic spying and digital burglary to a "controversial computer review.") Bipartisanship actually is alive and doing really, really well. Democrats and Republicans are equal opportunity offenders whose function is to coddle the super-rich while they take their legislative dictation and take in all that cash, becoming multimillionaires in their own right.

The CIA is not some rogue agency attached to the government. The CIA is the government, because the three ostensible check-and-balance branches have allowed it to be. It's just the way they want it.