The Strident Centrist Blog

James Wolcott’s blog, as well as his regular columns in Vanity Fair, are worth reading just for his stunning agility with the English language. For example, this review of the summertime HBO show “Big Love” is worth the read if only for this hilarious clause:

. . once Fred Thompson flops out of the presidential race, he’d make a fine addition to the cast, marinated as he is in the thick sauce of male prerogative.

And that’s just one of Wolcott’s patented figures of speech in the piece.

By the way, the wedding came off with a hitch, as was intended. He and his new wife will soon be off on their honeymoon trip to the Pacific Northwest. It was a wonderful weekend, with wonderful people, in wonderful weather beside the always wonderful Lake Superior.

R. J. Hillhouse, the proprietor of the blog The Spy Who Billed Me and author of Outsourced, a recently published novel about military and intelligence contractors, appeared this past week on the alternative radio public affairs program Democracy Now. Here’s an excerpt from the rush transcript, in answer to the question of Why Fiction:

Because I found that there were things that could only be written about in fiction. It’s amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to find that in this country we’re in a similar place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are going on in the intelligence community or things that are going on with our government with relationships between corporate and government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of fiction. So it’s an unusual transformation that a novelist would actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times, Washington Post and others to try to learn about what’s going on in outsourcing. So it’s very strange as a novelist that I actually have moved ahead of that.

Hillhouse is carving out a place on the media landscape as the go-to person on the implications of outsourcing, good, bad and neutral. Earlier this month she had an Op Ed piece in the Sunday WashingtonPost , and more recently in The Nation.

R. J. (Raelyn) Hillhouse is forcefully vague about her background, but but judging from her blog (The Spy Who Billed Me) and her recently published novel, Outsourced, it’s obvious that her CVs include serious time in the intelligence community and/or clandestine military operations. Today she has an Op Ed piece in The Washington Post about the extent to which intelligence operations have been outsourced to contractors over the past few years, and some of the troublesome implications thereof:

Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. (more…)