John Brennan's Trump problem

"Wet jobs" – those involving murder and assassination – were, for this tested scribe, permissible. Why not, for instance, do in Iraq's then leader, Saddam Hussein? "It really shocked me when he said that," came the alarmed words of one befuddled officer. "We've been so conditioned to the fact that such operations are wrong, that they're illegal." Prophetically enough, this same sentiment would find its way into the righteous callings of such self-professed socialists as Christopher Hitchens, whose enthusiastic calling for the destabilisation and overthrow of the Saddam regime yielded the most bitter of harvests.

A person who has more than squinted at the nature of such abuses from the CIA has been the libertarian Senator Paul. "This man had the power," snorted Paul of Brennan, "to search every American's records without a warrant. What's disgraceful is attacking the Bill of Rights and the freedom of every American."

Rand Paul's irate response to Brennan's Saturday effusion builds on his filibuster during Brennan's confirmations for CIA director in 2013. The lengthy session afforded him an opportunity to seek answers on what had become a notorious aerial targeting program that did not exempt US citizens. For 13 straight hours, he held the floor, admittedly falling short of Strong Thurmond's seemingly untouchable record. "Has America the beautiful," he rued, "become Alice's Wonderland? … Only in Alice's Wonderland would you sentence someone to death before trying him."

There is little doubt that Trump's caging of FBI investigative efforts and attempts to circumvent it are part of a broader struggle in Washington politics. Liberals, in their own version of Wonderland, find themselves the defending the rougher side of the deep state paladins.