Great outflanking of DiFi and Rockefeller, not a real friend of civil liberties between them, not with a spine anyway. How could either of them not support Panetta when the committee's minority leader does! Ha!

Now I look forward with relish the Obamacans' well-deserved and long-overdue chastening of the ass-backward, Confederate-leanin', progress-retarding Blue Dogs.

This may seem a little Off Topic, but one thing Leon Panetta did while the Democrats were out of office was to chair the US Catholic Bishop's Commission on Protection of Children -- in effect, the Commission designed to repair things after the Pedophile Scandals broke hard over the heads of the Bishops. If anything is more understood through a lens darkly than the CIA, it would be the Internal Politics of the Catholic Church.

Panetta was appointed chair of this commission only after the former Governor of Oklahoma, Frank Keating, had crashed and burned on the job. Keating had gone public with criticism of several powerful bishops and Cardinals who were slow rolling the necessary investigation, and got fired, and Panetta was brought in to 1) do the job, and 2) do it without confrontation with the powerful and the Vatican. And he was successful. It took him about 18 months, but he gradually built up trust in the commission, outsourced a full audit of every US Diocese's record dealing with reports of Priestly Pedophilia to the John Jay College of Law in NYC, did a public report that dug back to about 1945, and proposed a full range of reforms -- not reforms that were necessarily "required" but reforms that would be voluntary yet auditable.

The effect of this was that while done with proper decorum and respect, the American Catholic Bishops detailed many (not all mind you) of their errors and sins, recommended reforms, and above all built the pressure to settle up with the victims of Priestly Abuse -- pay up and say you are very very sorry. It probably cost the American Catholic Bishops about two and a half billion dollars to pay off and reform -- but Panetta did turn them around from standing in the church door and saying never -- to facing reality and understanding the necessity of change.

I put this on the table not because Bishops or Pedophilia are relevant to being CIA Director, but because it is an example of Leon Panetta's skills in very hot situations to lead in solving problems. In effect what he accomplished was to get church leaders to put all the rot on the table out in public, and then face the need for change. I think this may be what we actually want in a new CIA Director.

Bob Graham backs Panetta pick

"I think it’s a very creative and very solid choice," he said. "Leon’s background is as a user of intelligence...and as the president’s chief of staff, Leon had access to and ability to shape a large amount of intelligence. I think that skill that he has had and experience will be very useful."