The Dick and Leon Show

Wow, this is getting nasty. First Leon Panetta, CIA Figurehead, er, Director, opines that "it's almost as if (Cheney) is wishing that this country would be attacked again in order to make his point" -- i.e. about Obama's policies and statements leaving us wide open to further terrorism. And the Dickster, mild-mannered reporter that he is, responds that he hopes Panetta was misquoted.

This is another of those confrontations that I relish because everyone involved is so completely wrong... which means that no matter who loses, they will have deserved to lose. Another way of looking at it is as "dueling scams". One scam is that the Bush/Cheney administration "kept us safe" ever since 9-11. Well, they didn't catch Osama, but they did inaugurate a police state, and I guess if that qualifies as "keeping us safe" then they deserve full credit. But this all assumes that the "War on Terror" is not a hoax, whereas I contend that it is. And it also assumes that the 9-11 attacks really were a bolt out of the blue, and I contend that they weren't. In other words, the War on Terror and the associated restrictions on liberty stateside were both cooked up as part of a larger plan... and Cheney was one of the principals stirring the fetid broth. Plus, now that he is out of office he does not go gentle into that good night, but hangs around busting everybody's chops and pretending that he really and truly cares about "national security" -- after that disgraceful performance over the past eight years.

But that's just one side of the scam war. The other side is represented by Panetta, who has been installed in a kind of "boys' state" stage set called "CIA Director", when any idiot could tell you that the CIA "lifers" are not about to let some political hack move in and tell them what to do. So Panetta finds himself defending the indefensible, and, because he is so drastically out of his element, saying harsh things about a former vice president whose integrity is beyond doubt (ahem!). So we have a person who had great power, but now doesn't, vs. another person who appears to have great power, but who doesn't -- which is why the whole thing is totally farcical. But for all that, it's still being played out in public, which means on the world stage, and what is everyone else supposed to think about the firmness and reliability of our foreign policy when things like this are going on? What they're probably thinking is that it includes a high chaos factor -- in which case, they're absolutely correct.