Look, I don’t ask for much.
I like air conditioning that doesn’t cough out one lonely puff of lukewarm disappointment every thirty-seven seconds like an emphysemic Chihuahua trying to cool a Costco while looking at me like I’ve somehow become the villain for expecting refrigerative participation.
I like enough lemon with my shrimp cocktail to make the Gulf of Mexico file a missing-citrus report.
I like it when my son remembers the toilet seat is not a medieval drawbridge that has to remain permanently hoisted skyward in case an emergency platoon of dicks comes galloping over the horizon on horseback.
I’m a pretty simple broad.
The list of things I want, hope for, or expect from the universe is not particularly ambitious. I’m not out here demanding miracles, celestial intervention, or a private audience with the patron saint of finding the correct Tupperware lid on the first fucking try.
I’m certainly not holding out for a talking lobster named Monica who chain-smokes Virginia Slims on the back patio, dispenses catastrophically bad relationship advice with the confidence of a divorced couples therapist, insists every problem in life can be solved with paprika, and somehow always knows which neighbor is cheating on their spouse before the spouse does.
Nor am I expecting some cheerful, chipper, compulsively domestic laundry lunatic whose deepest fucking passion is steaming pillowcases, pairing orphan socks, whispering words of affirmation to Egyptian cotton, and removing fitted sheets from the dryer before they harden into a damp, hostile boulder roughly the size and emotional temperament of Chris Christie.
Hell, I’m not even asking for the New York Giants to win the Super Bowl this year, because unlike certain people occupying positions of tremendous authority, I possess at least a passing acquaintance with the difference between optimism and a full-blown dissociative episode.
You take my point.
I don’t spend my mornings standing in the backyard shaking my fist at the heavens because existence once again failed to provide me with a house-trained peacock named Darren, a sentient dishwasher that pays property taxes, or a tiny Portuguese maintenance man who lives behind my dryer, emerges every third Thursday to clean the lint trap while muttering aggressively in two languages, and disappears before I can thank him.
My expectations are modest.
Embarrassingly modest, frankly.
So I really don’t think I’m reaching here.
I don’t think I’m asking the cosmos to perform interpretive surgery on the laws of physics.
I don’t think this is one of those “be careful what you wish for” situations where a cursed genie climbs out of a decorative hummus bowl and starts negotiating contractual loopholes in ancient Aramaic.
I am asking for one thing.
One.
I’d like the person entrusted with overseeing some of the most sensitive national security intelligence on the face of the Earth to be capable of recognizing reality without first checking whether reality is going to upset the President or cause the self-appointed Emperor of Alternative Facts to stomp around the Oval Office like somebody hid the last Filet-O-Fish.
That’s it.
That’s my moonshot.
I need somebody who can tell me that two plus two equals four.
Not somebody who responds, “The President enjoys broad constitutional discretion in assessing competing numerical frameworks, and while I don’t want to prejudge hypothetical arithmetic, I think it’s fair to say there are sincerely held views on both sides of the equation, and I’d be reluctant to substitute my judgment for the Executive’s evolving understanding of addition.”
It’s four.
It’s fucking four.
And if the Director of National Intelligence can’t say that because he’s worried the President might prefer five, then I don’t trust him to tell the President he’s wrong about the things that actually get Americans killed.
Not charisma.
Not bedside manner.
Not somebody who can do a backflip while reciting the periodic table.
I’d settle for a grown-ass adult who can look at a blue sky and say, “Yep… that’s blue,” even if the occupant of the Oval Office is standing three feet away insisting it’s chartreuse with lavender racing stripes because he saw it on Truth Social somewhere between a conspiracy theory, an all-caps grievance, commemorative silver coins, and whatever miracle paste they’re marketing to eighty-year-old men who still think mirrors are the problem.
If I hold up a photograph of a golden retriever, I need him to say, “That’s a golden retriever.”
Not, “Well… it has certainly been identified by multiple observers as a mammalian entity.”
Not, “Reasonable people have expressed differing views regarding species.”
Not, “The matter has been extensively litigated.”
It’s a fucking dog.
Say “dog.”
That’s the job.
The Director of National Intelligence isn’t America’s Chief Feelings Officer.
He isn’t the White House’s emotional support intern wandering into the Oval Office every morning with a weighted blanket, a juice box, and twenty-seven carefully edited intelligence briefings scrubbed, sanded, sanitized, softened, and sweetened until every inconvenient fact has been safely removed.
His mission is almost offensively simple.
Tell the truth.
Even when the truth is ugly.
Even when it detonates somebody’s manufactured “narrative.”
Most of all then.
Reality has this irritating little personality flaw.
It doesn’t negotiate.
It doesn’t flatter.
It doesn’t pander.
It doesn’t care about polling.
It doesn’t care about propaganda.
It doesn’t care how loudly somebody screams at it on Truth Social.
And it sure as shit doesn’t give one single chicken-fried fuck how it makes Manbaby McMoron feeeeeel.
This wasn’t a history quiz.
This wasn’t some pointless little exercise in political trivia designed to embarrass a nominee on C-SPAN while six insomniacs and one guy trapped in a dentist’s waiting room happened to be watching.
This was a stress test.
A spine check.
A character test conducted in real time.
The Director of National Intelligence isn’t just another cabinet secretary with a nice business card and a government SUV.
This is the person the President turns to when satellites spot missile silos lighting up halfway around the world.
When a hostile foreign government starts probing our electrical grid like a burglar jiggling doorknobs at three o’clock in the morning.
When cyberattacks ripple through hospitals.
When sleeper cells start waking up.
When intelligence officers stationed in places you’ve never heard of whisper into secure phones that something very, very bad is about to happen.
The people in that room don’t deal in campaign slogans.
They don’t traffic in wishful thinking.
They don’t get to sprinkle glitter on reality, shove it through a focus group, and see whether it polls better after everybody’s had sandwiches.
Their entire job is to walk into rooms full of extraordinarily powerful people and say,
“Here’s what we know.”
However inconvenient.
However costly.
However completely it dismantles the story somebody powerful has already decided to believe.
That is precisely when it matters most.
I’d argue that’s the whole damn reason the office exists.
Intelligence that only tells a president what he wants to hear isn’t intelligence.
It’s astrology with a security clearance.
It’s fan fiction in a classified binder.
It’s propaganda wearing sensible loafers, a flag pin, and carrying a top-secret badge.
But Jay fucking Clayton couldn’t answer one painfully obvious question.
He couldn’t say:
Joe.
Biden.
Won.
Four syllables.
Apparently four syllables too many.
Why?
Because he knew those three simple, objectively true words would upset the oafish, orange, out-of-his-goddamn-mind octogenarian who nominated him.
This is a man who once chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission. A man whose reputation, before all of this, was that of a serious lawyer and an independent regulator. Someone entrusted with enforcing the law no matter whose ox got gored.
And there he sat.
Unable to utter three factual words because, somewhere along the way, pleasing Donald Trump became more important than the truth.
For the life of me, I will never understand why intelligent, accomplished, otherwise respected people choose to humiliate themselves for a corrupt, criminal, imbecilic sociopath.
There is no office prestigious enough.
No title shiny enough.
No proximity to power intoxicating enough.
No portrait hanging in some marble hallway worth surrendering your integrity for.
And yet here we are.
Watching another capable adult carefully audition for the role of Professional Reality Translator, standing between objective fact and an eighty-year-old man who apparently requires all unpleasant information to be wrapped in emotional bubble wrap before it can be delivered.
That isn’t leadership.
That isn’t loyalty.
It’s institutional cowardice dressed up in a tailored suit.
And if Jay Clayton couldn’t bring himself to say “Joe Biden won the 2020 election” when Donald Trump wasn’t even in the room…
What the fuck do you think happens when he is?
We didn’t create the Office of the Director of National Intelligence because Washington needed another title engraved on another brass plaque outside another government building.
We created it because, on one cloudless September morning, nearly three thousand people kissed someone they loved goodbye, walked out the front door believing they would be home for dinner, and instead disappeared into smoke, fire, collapsing steel, and history.
We created it because children grew up with stories instead of parents, because empty chairs became permanent fixtures at kitchen tables across America, because an entire country learned that the distance between ordinary life and unimaginable loss can be measured in a failure to connect the dots before it was too late.
That office is part of the promise we made standing in the ashes.
Not a political promise.
Not a campaign promise.
A sacred one.
A promise that never again would truth be allowed to die in silence because it was inconvenient, fragmented, ignored, or buried beneath bureaucracy, ambition, fear, or the fragile ego of a powerful man. A promise that somewhere, no matter who occupied the Oval Office, there would always be one person whose loyalty belonged first and last to reality itself. Someone who would gather every intercepted call, every satellite image, every frightened whisper from a source half a world away, every jagged fragment of a gathering storm, and carry it into the Oval Office exactly as it existed, unsoftened, unedited, and unafraid.
Truth has never cared about anybody’s politics.
It has never cared about polling.
It has never paused to protect a president from humiliation or a narcissist from embarrassment.
It simply arrives, indifferent and uncompromising, and demands to be reckoned with before the bill comes due in blood.
The day the Director of National Intelligence decides his highest obligation is protecting Donald Trump instead of protecting the truth is the day that office stops honoring the promise forged in the ashes of September 11th and becomes something infinitely more dangerous: another weapon in the hands of the very man it was created to protect us from.
And if we allow one man’s vanity, vengeance, and voracious appetite for absolute loyalty to become more important than the truth that office was created to defend, then we have done something far worse than forget why it exists.
We have looked into the smoke where nearly three thousand Americans took their last breaths. We promised ourselves they would not have died in vain. We swore that we would learn. We swore that we would do better. We swore that never again would loyalty to power outrank loyalty to truth.
If we break that promise now, then we haven’t merely failed to keep our word.
We have broken faith with every family that buried someone on September 11th.
We have looked into the ashes of one of the darkest days in our history and quietly decided that the promise we made there was only ever meant to last until it became politically inconvenient.
Some covenants are too sacred to be kept through speeches alone.
They endure only when ordinary people find the courage to tell powerful men the truth.
Especially when the man occupying the Oval Office has spent his entire public life proving he cares more about himself than he does about the United States.
Jay Clayton is not fit to serve as Director of National Intelligence.
Because he showed the Senate that his first allegiance is not to objective reality.
It is not to the memory of those we lost on that dark September day.
It is not to the safety of the American people.
It is to Trump.
And with that, today’s song:
I love you guys!
Stay strong, stay safe, and please stay connected to each other!
I appreciate all of you more than I could ever put into words.
Life has thrown something at me that has been genuinely difficult. Not the old bully, thankfully. That chapter finally seems to have closed, and I can’t tell you what a relief that is.
But a new challenge has arrived, and if I’m honest, it’s been weighing on me in ways I’m still trying to understand.
The only reason I’ve been able to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep showing up with my head held high, is because of this community. Your kindness, your encouragement, your belief in me, even on days when I’m struggling to believe in myself, have carried me farther than you’ll ever know.
Thank you for being here. Truly. I don’t take a single one of you for granted.
💙 Jo
