Sen. Diane Feinstein's anti-Panetta posturing.
At the outset let me make this abundantly clear, I hold no brief for Leon Panetta. And if the President-elect Barack Obama wants him as a Director of the CIA, he must have him. It should'nt be Senator Diane Feinstein who decides what the appropriate qualification for that CIA Director position should be. After all Feinstein has been one of the most surreptiously pro-George Bush members of the Senator. In the last 8 years she has sided with Republicans on many pseudo-security issues. Recently she undermined Democratic efforts in the Senate's Judicial Committee to vote down the nomination of Judge John Muckasey for attorney-general. She is now nit-picking on, and seem intent on derailing Panetta's nomination on the grounds that Panetta lacks intelligence experience. This woman's effort to undermine his nomination is as treacherous to President-elect's transition effort as her undercutting Democratic efforts to derail Muckasey's nomination. Feinstein did this selling-out despite Muckasey's undisguised propensity toward blind and extreme partisan support of Bush's anti-human rights and authoritanian security measures against American citizens. Even before she can even be made to account for those earlier transgression against her party, she is intent on another transgression, and, this time against Obama's Presidential transition process. Mark my word, if this woman is not sufficiently upbraided for this, she will get away with even more serious anti-Democratic infringements, with unconstructive consequences to the Obama-Democratic agenda.




