An Awful Pick

WOULD you ask your accountant to perform brain surgery on your child? That's the closest analogy I can find to the choice of Democratic Party hack Leon Panetta to head the CIA. Earth to President-elect Obama: Intelligence is serious. And infernally complicated.

Now we've fallen so low that left-wing cadres can applaud the nomination of a CIA chief whose sole qualification is that he's a party loyalist, untainted by experience.

The director's job at the CIA isn't a party favor. This is potentially a matter of life and death for thousands of Americans. But the choice of Panetta tells us all that Barack Obama doesn't take intelligence seriously. But the president-elect wanted a clean-slate yes-man, not a person of knowledge and integrity. (Guess we got Panetta because Caroline Kennedy has another engagement.) (By the way, how could Hillary be dumb enough to accept a job where success is impossible?)

Think morale's been bad at the CIA? Just wait.

To be a qualified D-CIA, a man or woman needs a sophisticated grasp of three things: The intel system, foreign-policy challenges, and the Pentagon (which owns most of our intelligence personnel and hardware). Panetta has no background - none - in any of these areas. If you handed Leon Panetta a blank map of Asia, I'd bet my life he couldn't plot Baghdad, Kabul or Beijing within 500 miles of their actual locations. This shameless hack appointment is an action by the incoming administration that seriously worries me.
Get intelligence wrong and you get dead Americans.

(An article from the New York Post)