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You write: "Nowhere have I claimed to have any facts. Nowhere have I claimed to be defending Grover Norquist. ... I'm just trying to make sure that I'm not being driven like a head of cattle into some pen. "

Advice: pay more attention to facts than only organ music you hear. Frank and myself have given you plenty of facts, none really "innocuous" and none refuted in all of these posts -- quite to the contrary, I and others have knocked every rhetorical challenge or shading of the facts out of the park. The organ music you here is the home run organ.

So let go of your bovine fears; there is no pen awaiting you but your mind.

I don't do Kobe Bryant om Free Republic, I do national security in the real world. You pehaps will have to adjust you settings.

You further write "If there are actual damning facts in there, I can't tell, because I don't know any facts"

Wow. what can I say. "I don't know who Dr., but they are out to get me." Listen, relax. Have a pizza with Bob. Some fine shiraz. Go for a walk. Ruminate, from the latin ruminare.

"Nothing personal" you say, to someone in a town where your word is everything and accusations you level are fighting words, at least among honorable people. You are sure enough to accuse me of "trickery" , "stretching" and "inflating" (the same facts you admittedly can't measure because you "don't have any"). Proove any of this; that is to say disproove any of the facts that Gaffney, the cited sources and I have stipulated. Otherwise you are doing the same infantile leftist thing Grover does when he accuses uncomfortable fact bearers as "racists and bigots" never bothering to firs, or apparently even later, check their facts or his own. See the trouble not having "any facts" leads to?

I'm sorry, but not surprised, to hear you have a "pitchfork and torch" in the closet. I have a vest and mask, but that's an occupational hazard of a different sort than you are used to, I gather. But, I did appreciate the Dylan Thomas reference though. Of course he wrote that about a real fire, as you doubtless know. Which prompts me to enquire: Are you now feeling the heat, or just still ignoring the smoke? Final advice: get lower down anyway. I won't think any worse of you for it; might not even notice. My aim is high. nite nite

...I do national security in the real world.
...just as he opposed the removing of the "wall" which I earlier identified as the single most imporatant change to date and which is reflected below as same.
Well, now it's my turn to comment/chastise and commend and you can pass it along to your national security buddies.
First of all, "the wall" was supposed to have been removed during the Clinton Administration. We all realize it wasn't because the petty turf wars were ongoing.
I could give you plenty of links, but I'm pretty sure you already know about that.

Secondly, the greatest provision in any of the new laws that I'm most thankful for is allowing people such as yourself to get information from the Internet. I personally don't see why intelligence people weren't using that from the get-go as the Net is the greatest source of study and independent research available.
I don't like some aspects of the PATRIOT Act myself. Recent events show that domestic money laundering is just one of the ways in which a law supposedly intended for "internationl terrorists" wasn't really that way at all from the outset, just like many stated and predicted. There were already enough laws on the books to cover that area of domestic criminality.

Lastly, and belatedly, kudos to all the new work you guys/gals have been doing lately. A little late, but better late than never. A little slow, but the tortoise wins the race in the fable.

P.S. I understand more from your replies the whys and wherefores that I brought up here. I still think it was wrong to allow it to go on as long as it did. They should've been busted long ago! I know, I know...the wall.

You are sure enough to accuse me of "trickery" , "stretching" and "inflating"

I said that about the Compendium of Facts, referring to the Horowitz article. That article contains such things. I'm sorry, but it does. It may well contain useful and damning facts. They would be more apparent if they were not mixed in with what is quite obviously hatchetry.

To tell people that Grover Norquist knows a guy who works at the White House whose father was a terrorist does not pass my test for linking Grover Norquist with terrorists. It passes my test for wondering why the 'national security professionals' would like me to stare at Grover Norquist -- instead of at them -- when I hear that the son of a terrorist was working at the White House. When I ask questions about this, I get answers like, "That's not our department." When I suggest that's a BS, bureaucrat's answer, I get back condescending bureaucratese, and the message that I have not refuted the "facts."

Now get I get a victory dance. I still don't know why that story is in the Horowitz article, other than it is a lame attempt to get people with short attention spans to think they just heard something bad about Grover Norquist, instead of something bad about the people at the White House who do background checks on new hires.

Using flag words like "evidence" and "proposition" to describe a conversation with a campaign manager about how to win votes is rhetorical trickery. That's what I mean by "playing creepy organ music." The stupid people are supposed to think they just heard something damning and horrible, when all they really heard is that some guy was telling Karl Rove how he thinks they could get more votes. Since I don't fall for crap like that, I get to be the unpopular guy who is "defending the traitor."

If this article is a sincere effort to expose the deeds of the misguided and/or traitorous Grover Norquist, why it is peppered throughout with misdirection plays and tricks worthy of a "60 Minutes" hatchet job? That is not an unreasonable question.

Even if I stipulate to Norquist having done some pretty weird things here that do not look good, I'm still left with wondering where this hatchet job is coming from, who is behind that, and why... because the hatchet job is an independent event. It also has perpetrators, and may also be motivated by evil, greed, political agendas, foreign influence, and so on. To say so is not to defend Norquist in any way. It is to open a new file called "political hit jobs by the national security community," which in the long run might be just as scary as anything Norquist did.

One evil at a time, perhaps, and if the current events are as you describe I'll even thank you for warning me about that. But I'll still wonder what else is happening here, because this is a 'hit.' Don't tell me isn't; we see them all the time. Down goes Trent Lott. Down goes Newt Gingrich. Down goes Grover Norquist. And don't come back with some rhetorical BS about how I just equated the evil deeds of Grover Norquist with anything that Trent Lott did. I'm using them as illustrations of media-blitz hit jobs, nothing more. We have one here, and let's recognize that. You're part of it, and you're not a saint in all of this. You are part of a take-down, and you are having entirely too much fun with it to be pure of motive. The glow of petty vindictiveness emanating from your notes is blinding. So whether or not Grover Norquist is a bad guy, I think the Republic might not be entirely safe from you either.