CAL BUZZ-Not since Dianne Feinstein’s Senate freshman year, when she rhetorically cold cocked Republican Larry “Wide Stance” Craig over gun control, has she won such attention as that prompted by her recent attack on the CIA.
From Rand Paul to Patrick Leahy, and on every broadcast and cable outfit in the land, DiFi earned plaudits for her takedown of Langley spooks for allegedly hacking computers of her intelligence committee staffers, in search of data crucial to the panel’s probe of Bush-era use of torture.
Fair enough, but what about the crucial issue of the mysterious Presidio Terrace drone?
While many media mavens left and right, large and small, gushed over Feinstein’s big spy-vs-spy speech, they looked away from the cuckoo claim by California’s senior Senator that she was snooped upon by a drone while in the considerable comfort of her San Francisco manse.
Not so “60 Minutes.”
At long last, two months after we started yammering about Senator DiFi’s phony fable regarding her imaginary friend the drone, the tick-tick-tick show became the one and only one MSM organization with the guts and grit to throw down the gauntlet on this momentous matter.
Okay, so it was a very soft and teeny gauntlet. But still.
Morley Safer, near the end of a pretty interesting piece on commercial drones, interviewed Dianne, who opposes their proliferation. At 10:17 of his report, Difi repeats the yarn she first spun to Senate committee in January, of how she “peeked” out the window during a Code Pink demonstration outside her home to find “there’s a drone facing me.”
Safer serves up a big yuk, quickly followed by footage of the protest against Feinstein’s staunch backing of the NSA’s massive data collection program: “The demonstrators who were protesting government surveillance say it wasn’t a drone, just a toy helicopter,” he says confirming what was first reported by the Atlantic Wire, and which we’ve been droning on about ever since.
Calbuzz get results. Again.
And now, a lighter story: With Feinstein and the CIA hurling accusations of law-breaking at each other, we see by the morning paper that the Justice Department doesn’t want any part of this one. Calbuzz doesn’t look for any charges to be filed anytime soon.
Five other takeaways from her pasting of her erstwhile Agency pals:
1-Those Bezerkeleyites and other libs suddenly hurling huzzahs at secrecy surveillance sweetheart Dianne for apparently changing her spots (mixed metaphor? –ed.) should hold off on the Nobel Peace Prize nomination letters. Despite trashing the CIA, there’s not a hint that she’s changed her mind on the NSA’s total monitoring of phone calls, emails, texts, Facebook postings and brain wave signals of Americans, which she insists are national security necessities, despite howls from what she condescends to call “the privacy people.”
2-Feinstein’s surprise attack comes amid widespread Democratic fears that they will lose the Senate in November; Republican control would cost her the chairmanship of the intelligence committee, and pose the possibility that the long-delayed torture report might never be released.
3-Feinstein at key points in her career has tended to use private, sometimes anecdotal experiences to craft policy. Two examples: Dianne has traced her flip-flop on capital punishment to witnessing, while on the state women’s parole board, a female felon’s testimony that she never took a loaded gun into an armed robbery for fear of accidentally killing someone and getting the death penalty. And Dianne routinely explains her support of gun control by recounting the gory details of finding Harvey Milk’s body after his assassination.
Now, suddenly, her transformation from intelligence community shill to fierce CIA critic comes only after her committee’s privacy may have been violated, never mind the feelings of millions of plain folks outraged by government spying on them, a double standard duly noted by critics from Jon Stewart to Edward Snowden.
4-It may be coincidence, but Feinstein turned on the CIA in Washington at a time when her popularity ratings at home are drooping; as Calbuzz has noted, she’s lost 15 points since being re-elected, during a time when she emerged as the most visible champion of government spying in the nation.
5-We should look so good at 80.
(Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine publish the award-winning CalBuzz.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 25
Pub: Mar 25, 2014