Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, June 7, 2010

Promoting the Serious People

By Dave Anderson:

 Being Serious means never paying any price for being wrong.  Being Serious means promotions after you have exhibited either horrendous judgment on one of the larger questions of your career or have demonstrated that you are a complete hack.  Being Serious means being the next Director of National Intelligence in the Obama Administration.

Via TPM:

A person familiar with the situation says President Barack Obama
plans to nominate Pentagon official James Clapper to be his next
intelligence chief despite objections from Capitol Hill. 

Clapper, a retired Air Force general, is the Pentagon's top
intelligence official. He's expected to be nominated in a Rose Garden
ceremony Saturday morning.

Jonathon Schwartz at a Tiny Revolution has the run-down on Clapper's career low light and confirmation into the Serious Person Club:

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he
believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been
transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an
effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before
the recent war.

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general,
said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into
Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe
that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of
Iraq.

''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw
what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and
disperse,'' General Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

I could understand being wrong about that question in November 2002, but by the invasion of Iraq, there was a preponderance of evidence that there was jack-shit in Iraq, hidden or not.  This statement was made in October 2003.  The evidence indicates that Clapper is either lacking in judgment and ability or is willing to say whatever his political masters want.  Neither is a good indicator of a functional and effective government. 





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2 comments:

  1. geoffJune 7, 2010 at 3:24 AM

    I'd love to be a fly on the wall during one of Clapper's Obama briefings. I'm feeling sorry for Obama having to look at the sour-puss Clapper mug then try to make it through the rest of the day without thinking of simply sticking your head in a gas-oven.
    Pat Lang has some personal recollections of the guy, one of which is that he's maybe an out-of-control type A who is also "rude, surly and inflexible". Perfect for poor old Obama:
    http://bit.ly/cKDIQD

    ReplyDelete
  2. andersonJune 8, 2010 at 7:19 AM

    "The evidence indicates that Clapper is either lacking in judgment and ability or is willing to say whatever his political masters want."
    Sounds like an establishment winner to me!

    ReplyDelete

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