Leon Panetta, the Covert Eugene Levy, To Head CIA

How eerie is that?

Jonn mentioned that Obama's pick to head up the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, seems to be a bit lacking in spook experience:

With a war raging across the globe, do we really need a poltician with no intelligence experience running our intelligence service? A guy who is going to consider the political impact of every decision instead of the welfare of the nation and the American? And where's this damn change we were promised?

But you are wrong, dear sir, because it turns out that Panetta actually has some experience with the CIA during the Clintonian years. RedState digs up something at the CIA website:

Woolsey also used DOD as an ally in preparing and defending the Intelligence Community’s program and budget. Leon Panetta, the Clinton administration’s first director of OMB, had indicated to Woolsey early in 1993 that OMB was considering providing the DCI with top-line guidance, perhaps with a publicly disclosed figure, and seeking sizable out-year cuts in intelligence spending. Woolsey also faced skeptical audiences in Congress anxious to find an additional “peace dividend” in intelligence spending as well as in the larger defense budget. From Woolsey’s perspective, he had the unenviable task of managing declining intelligence budgets in an era of multiplying intelligence targets (the “poisonous snakes”)

We all know what effect dumbing down the nation's intelligence apparatus had on our country. Two embassy bombings, a suicide attack on one of our ships, and a 9/11 later, the conventional wisdom is that intelligence funding shouldn't have been the first item on the chopping block for federal spending.

However, some prominent progressives might be ecstatic that Panetta isn't tainted by the Bush-era torture policies. I don't think my neighbor, the 8th-grade Social Studies teacher, was waterboarding KSM in some secret prison either, but that doesn't mean he should be in charge of the biggest spook organization in the world.