Clapper, you may recall, unequivocally said "no, sir" in response to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asking him: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper's response was shown to be a lie by Snowden's disclosures, as well as by reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News (among others). This is particularly significant, considering lying before Congress prevents the legislative branch from performing oversight and is therefore a felony.

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The AP story about "the federal government spending less and less on its main program for preventing blazes" can seem at first glance to fit within this pathology; it looks like another example of politicians who cheerily back bigger defense budgets and an expensive border buildup pretending to be fiscal conservatives by irresponsibly shortchanging the most essential of domestic programs. But, then, thankfully, there's no evidence that this funding cut has hampered efforts to stop the fires currently burning. And, more important, while Selective Deficit Disorder may in fact be the cause of the reduced federal funding for firefighting, a close look at the wildfire problem suggests that in this rare case, such reduced funding may inadvertently be the most responsible long-term policy.

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Shaye is the Yemeni journalist who in 2009 exposed his government's coverup of a U.S. missile strike that, according to McClatchy's newswire, ended up killing "dozens of civilians, including 14 women and 21 children." McClatchy notes that for the supposed crime of committing journalism, Shaye was sentenced to five years in prison following a trial that "was widely condemned as a sham" by watchdog groups and experts who noted that the prosecution did not "offer any substantive evidence to support (its) charges."

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the American government's attitude toward press freedom? That's where Scahill's movie comes in. As the film shows, when international pressure moved the Yemeni government to finally consider pardoning Shaye, President Obama personally intervened, using a phone call with Yemen's leader to halt the journalist's release.

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The reason that's my guess is because unlike other movies and TV shows about politics, "Veep" -- whose season finale just aired -- portrays politicians, staffers, lobbyists and reporters not as the heroic idealists and brilliant Machiavellis that politicos desperately want to see looking back at them from the mirror. Instead, "Veep" shows Washington for what it is: not merely Hollywood for trolls, but a place where painfully average and often untalented drones follow their star-fucking ambitions only to be caught in a soul-sapping system that devours whatever last remaining shreds of humanity they still possessed.

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The best way to see these double standards is to ponder 10 simple questions.

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This story began last year, when the White House told the New York Times that President Obama was personally overseeing a "kill list" and an ongoing drone bombing campaign against alleged terrorists, including American citizens. Back then, much of the public language was carefully crafted to reassure us that our country's military power was not being abused.

In the Times' report - which was carefully sculpted by Obama administration leaks - the paper characterized the bombing program as "targeted killing" with "precision weapons." It additionally described "the care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets" and claimed that as "a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the president believes that he should take moral responsibility" for making sure such strikes are as precise as possible.

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Michael is probably best known as the Rolling Stone reporter who had the guts to challenge the military establishment by publishing a piece that ended up getting Gen. Stanley McChrystal removed from his post. Even a brief perusal of the headlines of his reporting for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed show that such a truth-to-power attitude defined his professional career.

I knew Michael through crossing paths with him in our respective work (most recently in one of the best TV experiences I've ever had -- a Young Turks panel with him, Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur).

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Thanks to what I've previously called the No Money Rule, however, there have only been indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in the form of stories about the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor that employed Edward Snowden.

CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm's multibillion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the military-industrial complex -- a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is "a $56 billion-a-year industry."

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Let's also say that you simply accept at face value the Government's unverified assertion that it has halted "systemic" illegal/unconstitutional surveillance by the National Security Administration. And let's say that you still believe such an assertion even though a few years after it was aired 1) the Director of National Intelligence admitted illegal surveillance was still taking place and 2) Mother Jones reports that an 86-page court ruling "determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying."

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Almost universally, the government officials, pundits and reporters who comprise Permanent Washington have derided Snowden and those who helped him disseminate his disclosures. For instance, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., bashed him for committing "treason" while Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called for the arrest and prosecution of the journalists who broke the NSA snooping story. Likewise, establishment pundits from CNN's Jeffrey Toobin to the New York Times David Brooks loyally defended government's national security agencies by respectively assaulting Snowden as a "narcissist" and a loser who "could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school." Meanwhile, plenty of Obama loyalists -- many of whom criticized the Bush administration for much less invasive surveillance -- took to Twitter to berate Snowden as an attention-seeking traitor.

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Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden's disclosures with this video of Clapper's Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects "any type of data on millions (of Americans)," Clapper has become American history's most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

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For example, Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations said of Edward Snowden: "'Whistleblower' is person who reveals wrongdoing, corruption, illegal activity. none of this applies here even if you oppose U.S. government policy." Likewise, the Boston Globe's Bryan Bender insists, "I wish media would stop calling Snowden a whistleblower -- it maligns those who truly reveal corrupt or illegal activity." And the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin definitively states: "These were legally authorized programs."

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Before getting to that monumental query, let's first review officialdom's reactions to the NSA story that are leading to it.

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To review the latest news: Earlier today, the president called the unprecedented program "modest" and insisted that "nobody is listening to your phone calls." Belcher -- who advises the White House on how to frame issues -- went even further, casting the program as nothing more invasive than, say, your bank logging your personal financial transactions or a pollster evaluating data. Watch it here:

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On the political junkie side of this chasm are those of us who follow politics and social issues closely. We typically get our information through niche media, email newsletters, membership organizations and the attendant social media feeds. The media that serves this audience seems perfectly happy to commodify dissent by providing niche content that speaks only to a narrow audience -- and nobody else. To many looking in from the outside, that creates the image of a holier-than-thou insularity that is, to say the least, off putting. Ultimately, from within this bubble, "activism" becomes narrowly defined as a grinding project of political work trying to somehow convince A) politicians to do things their donors don't want them to do or B) the larger politically disengaged world to do stuff that can seem too difficult (door knocking, phone banking, etc.) or wholly futile (signing petitions, sending a letter to a lawmaker, etc.).

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The assumption in our culture is yes, but it's not always so clear-cut when you consider the key ways we are exceptional in comparison to other industrialized countries.

America, for instance, has an exceptional economy. GDP-wise, it is the largest in the world, making it the planet's most powerful engine of technological innovation and wealth creation. At the same time, the economy is exceptional for creating the industrialized world's most financially unequal society; producing one of the industrialized world's highest rates of childhood poverty; and mandating the industrialized world's least amount of off time (paid sick days, maternity leave, etc.).

In terms of healthcare, we have an exceptional system that stands out for spending more than any other nation's. According to the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, that gets us a system that "is at the top of the charts when it comes to surviving cancer (and) drives much of the innovation and research on health care worldwide."

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This, of course, is the true definition of the theology of militarism - a worship of all things martial. It is America's civic religion and explains much. For example, it explains why we have a Memorial Day that remembers those in the military who lost their lives but still excludes those other civilian public servants who also lost their lives while on the job. It also explains why we have a political culture of Military Exceptionalism - that is, a culture that deems it perfectly acceptable to slander civilian public employees but almost never acceptable to criticize the public employees who comprise the armed forces.

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Before getting to the big news, let's review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City's major education announcement this weekend, the "reform" fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher "accountability" is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key -- and deliberate -- omission serves myriad political interests.

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The trouble, of course, is that the folklore has a diminishing connection to reality. Case in point is the narrative that now defines the Washington debate over gun control.

This week, in a piece summarizing that narrative, Time magazine's White House correspondent Michael Scherer asserted that television ads pressuring lawmakers to support background check legislation will harm Democratic politicians who represent Republican-leaning states (ed. note: Scherer disputes this interpretation of his argument). About the ads, Scherer asked: "Is it better to teach wavering Democrats that there is a cost to voting against gun control, even if it jeopardizes Democratic control of the Senate, which is needed to enact gun control?"

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First came news that two previously cable-only channels, TBS and TNT, "are about to become the first national entertainment networks in the industry to stream on-air content live across multiple platforms," likely positioning the stations to eventually (though not yet) sell their content direct to consumers on an à la carte online basis, rather than only through traditional cable TV packages. Then yesterday came word that CNN and BuzzFeed are partnering to create a YouTube channel, allowing anyone with an Internet connection -- but not necessarily a costly cable subscription -- to view the new content.

The action this (and other similar news in the television world) should prompt, of course, is cutting your cable TV cord -- or at least considering it.

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