"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."
This is what Leon Panetta said yesterday about former Vice-President Dick Cheney. What is one to think about a public official who makes such an outlandish statement about a former vice-president? Panetta, who now (for no legitimate reason) is the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recently had to respond to the estimable Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi after she excoriated the professionals in the agency he heads by calling them liars, should know better. His response to Pelosi's charges (in a memo not addressed to Pelosi) was extremely meek, and morale at the CIA is said to be as low as it was during the Church Committee Hearings in the 70's. Since that meek response, Panetta has declined to speak again about the accusations of Pelosi which, if true, would constitute a felony. In fact, no one in the media seems to be interested in pushing Pelosi to turn over evidence to support her charges to the DOJ either. If Panetta had anything to him, he would not let such heinous charges simply fade away, leaving his agency's reputation tarnished in the eyes of some forever. It might appear to a skeptic that Panetta has backed off for political reasons (no need to challenge false charges by a member of his own party), but shouldn't the director of the CIA be above politics - or at least apolitical? It would seem to bolster the skeptic's theory that Panetta (no doubt frustrated by his inability to do the right hing about Pelosi's charges) has decided to take on the man most feared by his own party's leadership. After all, who in his party would object to his making such a wild charge of his own against the Democrats' favorite target? And so, Panetta has done it: he has made a wild, unfair, and totally ludicrous accusation against a true American Patriot, and exposed himself to be nothing but a partisan political hack. My condolences to the professionals at the CIA.
Here is the response of a true professional to such scandalous tripe.
"I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted," Cheney said, in a written statement to FOX News. "The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years."
