It sounds like something straight out of “Brave New World.”

The Washington Post, after an investigation lasting two years, decided to expose the insanely huge spending and massive size of the intelligence community in a Monday online report entitled “Top Secret America.”  Headed by notorious lefties Dana Priest and William Arkin, who normally shouldn’t be given the time of day, this massive list of over 1,900 companies – most of them based in the Eastern US – fingers everything from AT&T to Novell (sorry, Microsoft haters) as employed by the government in some capacity or another.  Over a third of them (36%) are large companies with 101-500 employees, and according to a DNI memo 70% of the yearly intelligence budget is spent on contracts for everything from satellites to food service.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, created during the first year of the Kennedy administration, underwent a 225% growth from 2003 onward.  In the words of the Post itself:

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

Or, responsibly remembering what to do with.  Agents tasked with assimilating the data couldn’t have been trusted with their lives to remember it all when it was going in one ear and out the other.  Per NCTC director Michael Leiter, the Christmas underwear bomber was not defeated by trillions of dollars in spending, but by the involvement of more than 850,000 top secret contractors in the intelligence community.  It became insanely hard to tell who was doing what, where or even when.  Admiral Dennis Blair, former National Intelligence Director, admitted to oversight committees that he hadn’t designated clear responsibility regulating the mess to those involved.

And as if that weren’t laughable enough, senior intelligence officials are being expected to read through mountains of classified information reports – one of them, bearing the name of “Weekly Warning Forecast,” sounds more like a Weather Channel segment on Southeast hurricane activity than an intelligence briefing.

The intelligence community of today isn’t something that can reasonably be called “effective.”  Not by a long shot.  It’s been said that the best solutions are often the simplest, and that’s something an administration which has made its own efforts to take control of the Internet in the name of national security can take to the bank.

If Obama “came into office aware of the problems,” according to his own officials, then why has he taken so long to fix them?

Could it be that he doesn’t have any interest in truly doing so, save for those measures which will actually hurt our men in uniform?

This is little more than a convenient out for him to blame another one of his problems on Bush, yet again.  And you can be sure the Washington Post’s writers will be eating it up – they never lifted a finger in protest of the plunging government deficit or, in Arkin’s case, a massive environmental racket devoted to increasing UN control over the world’s economies.

With two years working on this, but a grand total of one article in the past two years shedding light on the New Black Panther case – or rather, the Post’s lack of attention to same – there’s no reason to believe the folks that talked such a good game back in the Ashcroft years will paint a fresh target on anyone’s back.

Get ready for another round of Bush Derangement Syndrome, folks.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.