"Even a marginally Secret Service."

That scene (from Sherlock) continues:

"You don't trust your own Secret Service?"

"Naturally not. They all spy on people for money."

For a while, I've wondered at the near-universal (heck, universal, and, in publicizing them, certainly unprofessional and unethical) leftist tendencies of ex(?) heads of the Shin Bet and Mossad. It's just so bizarre- that movie "The Gatekeepers" got every single living former head of the Shin Bet to participate. They say Dichter wasn't so happy with it, but they still used him. There's got to be some explanation, I figured. I think I've finally put it together.

It connects to how Tom Wolfe describes the Bronx District Attorney's office in The Bonfire of the Vanities:You're a young graduate of a New York law school, probably ethnic and/or idealistic (hence the public service), thus probably liberal. You're going to change the world. You're going to help people. And you spend years putting minority defendants behind bars, because all the criminals in your county are black or Hispanic, because everyone charged is guilty, and because that's your job. And so you start developing fantasies. The most important one of that novel is, of course, the Great White Defendant. Something to prove that you're not evil.

Well, here you are, a well-educated, smart, Ashkenazi secular Israeli from the right background. (How else do you rise this far?) Dollars to donuts you tend to the left. And you spend a few years killing Palestinians or Gulf Arabs or Iranians or whatever, because that's who constitutes the threat to your country, and that's your job, and God bless you for it. But you become a little disillusioned. That type of dirty work can take a toll on any man, especially one without a certain ideological foundation. And your ego pipes up too- here you're working in the background, no one knows what you're doing, and until recently they didn't even know your name. You'd like to be recognized. You'd like to make a difference in a big, public way. You'd like to end it all, and in a way that matches your politics. And so you start fantasizing that, say, the real threat to the state is a handful of Kahanist kids with spray paint. You get a touch of the old Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but above all, to assuage your conscience, you begin to think that talking to Abbas or even Hamas and giving them the store would be a fine idea and start telling everyone your about your deep insight into matters about which you have, let's be honest, no experience or expertise. You get to like the adulation of the Left and the "West." (Which is, after all, Herzog and Livni's whole "platform.") And, therefore, you become a big voice for the Left and won't shut up about it.

Just a thought.