Partisan Political Hack Leon Panetta Demonizes Dick Cheney

Leon Panetta is proving what a partisan political hack Americans always should have known he is and always has been.  I first called Panetta a “partisan political hack” back in January when he was first nominated.  And Panetta’s outrageous cheap-shot at Dick Cheney is nothing short than the tactics of a partisan political hack.

The difference between the CIA and the KGB has always been that the one was geared toward intelligence, while the latter was geared toward enforcing political ideology.  At least until Barack Obama came along, that is.  Now we’ve got our first “communist show trials” since the days of McCarthy and the latter days of the USSR in the works.

And now we’ve got Obama’s Homeland Security defining “rightwing extremists” in terms of Obama’s conservative political opponents (not to mention returning combat veterans), and we’ve also got Leon Panetta demonizing political disagreement by personally attacking the motives of conservatives.

Cheney: I Hope Panetta Was ‘Misquoted’ in Claiming My Wish for Attack
After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Dick Cheney says he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.

FOXNews.com
Monday, June 15, 2009

Dick Cheney says he wants to know if he heard Leon Panetta correctly.

After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Cheney said Monday he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.

“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.”

Others were not quite willing to give Panetta the benefit of the doubt, as his politically charged quote stirred controversy on Capitol Hill.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on Panetta to “retract immediately” his statement, arguing that the director crossed the line.

“I disagreed with the Cheney policy on interrogation techniques, but never did it cross my mind that Dick Cheney would ever want an attack on the United States of America,” the former GOP presidential candidate told FOX News Monday. “And it’s unfair, and I think that Mr. Panetta should retract, and retract immediately.

“By the way, I hear morale is not at an all-time high over at the CIA under Mr. Panetta’s leadership,” he said.

Panetta, a long-time Washington insider with scant intelligence experience, has been caught in the middle of a political war during his first few months on the job. First, he had to deal with morale issues as President Obama cracked down on the rules for detainee interrogations. Then he stepped up to dispute House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s allegation that the CIA misled Congress about the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

This time, he’s firing back against Cheney’s frequent media appearances in which he’s accused Obama of making America less safe.

According to The New Yorker, Panetta said Cheney “smells some blood in the water” on the 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,” he said, according to the piece.

Asked about the statement, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ducked.

“I’m not going to get into motivations. That’s not what our business is. The president’s concern is keeping the American people safe,” Gibbs said Monday.

FOX News’ Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.

Maybe Gibbs isn’t “going to get into motivations.”  But his fellow liberal hack – CIA Director Leon Panetta – sure will.

Maybe the CIA has some kind of “motive analyzer” that Panetta zapped Dick Cheney with.  In the liberal tradition, I must ask, “Doesn’t Panetta need some kind of warrant to zap private citizen Cheney with his spook motive-detector gizmo?  Liberals and the ACLU should be crawling out of the woodwork.  Don’t forget, that’s what they did when they found out that the government was listening in to calls made to or from people on the terrorist watch list to or from this country.

This is classic liberal politics of demonization and demagoguery.  This is classic Nancy Pelosi.  This is classic Barack Obama.

A quote from an earlier article about the LAST TIME liberals hatefully and viciously teed-off on Dick Cheney should serve to show just how often Obama has demagogued – and hypocritically demagogued at that – Bush-era policies:

Right now, liberals like Keith Olbermann are teeing off on conservatives for waterboarding when we now learn that liberals like Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats were fully briefed on “enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed,” and neither said or did anything to prevent such techniques.  And even the very liberal new CIA Director under Obam0, Leon Panetta, essentially says Pelosi is lying.  How are their attacks now anything but partisan demagoguery?

And right now, liberals including Barack Obama himself are deceitfully claiming the moral high ground even as the new liberal administration takes many of the same positions that it hypocritically and demagogically found so hateful on the campaign trail.  As many policies as Obama has undone that will make this country less safe, there have been almost as many that he once demonized, only to follow himself once in office.

For instance, President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate.  Given that President Bush used the technique against only three individuals shortly after the worst disaster in US history, how is Obama any different?  In fact he’s worse, because Bush and Cheney never demagogued the issue as Obama has repeatedly done.

Obama demonized Bush over the Bush policy on rendition.  But now this demagogue is quietly continuing to carry out the same rendition policy – abducting terrorist suspects and sending them to countries that will use harsh interrogation methods – even as he congratulates himself in front of a fawning media for his being better than Bush.  But Obama isn’t better than Bush and Cheney; he’s worse.  Because he’s a hypocrite and a demagogue.

In the words of the New York Times, military commissions was “a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.”  But now the hypocrite and demagogue is going to quietly use them himself.

And Obama has indicated that he likewise reserves the right to continue to hold some prisoners without trial indefinitely – a position he demonized during the campaign.  How can such a man who so hypocritically employed such demagoguery only to come to the same position as the man he demagogued claim any semblance of moral high ground?  Obama is lower than Bush in his character, not higher.  Bush and Cheney didn’t self-righteously demagogue; only Obama did.

Dick Cheney is often called “Darth Vader” by the left.  But I think in Cheney’s gracious response to Panetta’s vicious, hateful, and evil comment who the REAL “Darth Vaders” are.  Panetta savagely attacked Cheney’s motives; Cheney responded by politely pointing at policy disagreement.

Now that liberals have opened the door wide to attacking people based on their motives and their politics, let me do a little “motive assessment” of my own: Maybe Leon Panetta is aware that the morale of his agency is at a shocking low after the butchery Democrats have done to its credibility.  And maybe he is aware – due to the “depressed, sullen, and enraged” morale at the CIA in the wake of the Obama administration’s and Democrat’s attacks against them – that the United States is now exposed to another massive terrorist attack.

From a Newsweek article on the poor morale of the CIA:

[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”

Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.

Just maybe Panetta and his boss realize that the only way to avoid blame for such an upcoming attack will be to try to preemptively blame and scapegoat  conservatives by saying that THEY are somehow more responsible than the Democrats who totally undermined our war on terror at every single turn because conservatives might have somehow hoped for it.