Is it just me, or is there a rising flood of highly classified political vomit oozing about our ankles, lapping at our knees and spreading over the entire public discourse to the extent that no idea or even simple statement of fact can be recognized for what it is once it enters the tarpit of secrecy?
Yes, dear reader, I've been watching C-Span again - the Gonzalez/NSA affair, and so I refer of course, to the secrets upon secrets that are only as secret as we need them to be and only when we need them to be secret. Because if the actual content of the secret gets us in less trouble than not keeping the secret secret, then suddenly it's not a secret anymore, or at least not as much of a secret. In which case, even a super secret can become a non-secret as long as my name is kept secret.
Got it? We lied to you because of the thing we couldn't tell you about, which we told you about, but not really all about it because then it wouldn't be very secret would it? So the secret that shouldn't have been a secret, but was because it was illegal, became a non-secret because lying about it also happened to be illegal (how unfair is that?) and we're less worried about going to jail over the secret itself, or about telling the truth about the secret (which is also illegal) than we are about lying about the secret.
And the secret meeting about the secrets with the sick guy in the hospital bed with his wife, who really, really shouldn't have heard any of these secrets? Don't get me started about that because then you get into disputes, and disputes about the disputes and whether the disputes were about the secret that isn't a secret or about the secret that really is a secret even though millions of people (okay thousands of people) who watch C-Span or read emptywheel now know everything about it except its shoe size and its favorite color. That's pretty much undisputed.
And then I'd have to address the question of whether two secrets that make no sense without each other are actually the same secret or whether they are, in reality, so unrelated that even mentioning them in the same diary marks me as a Not Serious Person who doesn't understand the value of secrets. Which leads, like marijuana to munchies, to the people who report the secrets and whether or not they should be reporting the secret, or the secret about how they came to learn the secret which, to some people makes them secret-makers and thus part of the overall Secret Problem.
And if we got through all that, we might end up tiptoeing through a minefield of vice presidential special secrets. What makes them special, aside from their secretness (which really isn't all that special anymore because almost everything you might really need to know is a secret these days), and the fact that the vice president keeps watch over them with a shotgun from behind a nearby shrubbery, is that they're even kept secret from the people who are paid to make sure that the people who get told the secrets keep the secrets. Which kind of makes the vice president's secrets secreter than the secrets made by the professional secret makers even though the vice president is really only camping out in secret land until his term is up while the professionals make and keep secrets for their entire careers, or until they're outed by the vice presidents chief of staff.
So now you know the truth about the secrets. And you learned it from a dirty fucking hippy who desperately wishes Frank Church was still around to blow this whole mess up and start all over again. How sad is that? To live through Watergate and then, 30 years later, look back on it as some sort of golden era.