But without agency or any intelligence firsthand experience, how would a clueless Panetta be able to design a mission, or interrogate a key Al Quida operative, with radical Islam burgeoning worldwide, and the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan? Is this any time for on the job training?

Panetta, a good manager-type of executive, is filling a position requiring someone with a adequate set of skills that would give him the AUTHORITY needed to run a spy agency. After all, would any big-city mayor have any hope of keeping his job if he were to appoint someone as police chief who'd never been a cop himself? Is there any difference here? This is nothing short of a massive blunder on Obama's part, despite what his liberal supporters of the appointment may say.

Obama seems to be conducting some mad scientist experiment with his attempt to prove that one need not be sophisticated in the field of spying to become the head of a department of spies. Obama is now playing with the safety of America. Panetta has absolutely no experience in the intelligence world, but was once the director of the Department of Management-basically another Clinton pencil-pusher running a new show. And if the country is attacked because of this, who would take responsibility? The liberal left, who basically coerced Obama into making such a clueless appointment?

Yes; it's that "change" thing again. Panetta has no knowledge of CIA structure or staffing, and will undoubtedly cause agency morale to plummet. This also means all the old CIA hands will be fired that support coercion, interrogation, eaves-dropping, and prisons. So who will replace them? The Peace Corps?

With Panetta at the CIA's helm, clandestine is out, and transparency is in. So now, let everyone in Congress be apprised of the agency's every move-that's the way to do it! Play "I've got a secret" on Capitol Hill. Homeland security is out, and Pollyanna is in. From now on, we'll make nice with Al Quida, and they'll certainly return the favor. Perhaps their next planned attack won't be as harsh. Maybe they'll switch from boxcutters to nail files in the new Panetta-Obama era of being nice to the bad guys.

And maybe if Iran's president, Ahmadinejad, NOW decides to attack Israel, or Osama hits New York again; Mr. Panetta and Obama can send a "strongly-worded" message to remind them that they're not being nice. So in this new era of being cute with our enemies, what would happen if maybe we did capture Osama? We wouldn't (couldn't) interrogate him under the new ground rules?

Yes; let's be nicer to our enemies, just turn the other cheek, and see how nicely they return the favor. If we had found Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 plot, and EXECUTED him, we might have avoided both the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars, prevented the 3000 casualties of 9-11; and the World Trade Center towers would still be proudly standing in lower Manhattan. Yes, that’s what a good, FUNCTIONING, CIA intelligence agency can do.

But the operative word here is 'functioning'- A CIA with no ability to get tough might as well become a branch of the USO, according to the liberal leftists. After all, the goal of the CIA is intelligence-not public relations, as Obama has suddenly come to believe by appointing the 70 year old Panetta .

But is there a reason Obama feels he needs to give Panetta a job? Is this some sort of a quid pro quo? This is a very poor fit based on Panetta's lack of experience. Does Leon have something on Barack, or could he possibly be this clueless?

Former intelligence veterans have a litany of concerns about what will amount to the most inexperienced intelligence director to be appointed since the creation of the CIA in 1947. And current employees are enraged that a political hack is being named CIA director. It's demeaning to the entire 20,000 person staff. It's painfully obvious to anyone with agency experience that Panetta is unqualified to lead the CIA-end of discussion-period!

In choosing Leon E. Panetta to be the next CIA director, President-elect Obama appears to have concluded that a spy chief who understands politics, may be better equipped to carry out the incoming administration's national security agenda than one who understands espionage

This is like appointing the head of Starbucks as director of the FBI, because that person has great organizational experience. And what if the FBI had no powers of interrogation? What instead, if our public enemies were given coffee and donuts, and encouraged to discuss their experiences? How well would that work out?

Could the United States have won World War II without intelligence? Because the OSS was capable of killing certain Nazi operatives (and used clever deception), the Allies were able to convince Hitler that the D-day invasion would occur at Calais rather than Normandy. This shortened the war by at least a year, and possibly saved the entire western world!

Could the independent state of Israel have survived without its fabled intelligence force, the Mossad? It was the Mossad that uncovered the Arab plans for the 1967 Six Day war, where the Israelis knew the Egyptians and Syrians were coming; and the resulting pre-emptive Israeli air strikes prevented disaster and gave the conflict its name, "6 -Day War". How many lives were saved because of the brevity of this war?

But this is what intelligence agencies do --by playing hardball with the enemy (torture, interrogation, coercion, deception) you trade some human suffering on the part of your foe for the saving of your own countrymen's lives, and avoid any surprise attacks.

This is the purpose of intelligence-it's security. You save your own country from possible disaster through pre-emptive intelligence operatives: spy-vs-spy...We vs. Them. That's the real world out there. You will not be safe by playing softball with the enemy. Being  sneaky is a necessity- not by being open and playing goody-goody.  

For years after World War II, U.S. intelligence forces had done their job well. The CIA succeeded in stalemating the KGB during the Cold War era in Asia . The agency had been staffed by the former members of the OSS , our World War II spy service. Before 1977, the CIA was highly effective world wide in keeping Washington informed as to what our enemies were up to.

But then came the election of Jimmie Carter in 1976, and the sad dismantling of a once-proud, highly-motivated intelligence organization. Carter, like all liberals, believed in being "fair". So what did Carter see as the first place to single out for reforming? It was those nasty, dastardly, secretive, 'immoral' CIA brigands. After all, hadn't the CIA taken part in assassinations, deception, blackmail, torture, and other knavish misdeeds during the 50 's and 60's?

Today, it can be noted back in history when Carter made one of the most ill-conceived presidential decisions of all time: He issued an executive order that placed all nine U.S. intelligence agencies under the coordination of one man: CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who was 54 years old at that time

Stansfield Turner had no agency or intelligence experience of any kind. He was Jimmie Carter's college roommate at the Naval Academy. Carter probably would have done just as well to appoint Mr. Rogers, or Mr. Magoo for that matter, because like Carter, Turner saw the world through rose colored glasses, and was blind to the true realities that indeed, America had many implacable enemies around the world, especially in the Middle East

In October of 1977, Turner issued an administrative order to sharply curb many of the clandestine practices that had brought the CIA much of its criticism from the liberal members in Congress back then (i.e. Idaho Senator Frank Church). 

Long time CIA veterans began complaining about Mr. Turner's abrasive, arrogant style. So Turner callously decided to clean house. On Halloween of '77, Turner circulated a photocopied memo informing 800 staffers (mostly Republicans) of their dismissal. Many of the people fired were seasoned agents, going all the way back to the OSS of World War II. A lot of them spoke Arabic, and were fluent in other foreign languages.

It has been noted by many historians that Stansfield Turner was the single worst senior presidential appointment in U.S. history. Turner has been described as..."a CIA traitor, appointed by Jimmie Carter to castrate the agency...In eliminating virtually all human intelligence on the ground, he put the U.S. at a strong disadvantage, especially in the Middle East and Afghanistan".  

But Obama and his idealogues have decided to repeat History 30 years later, just like the last liberal president who ruined the CIA with an inexperienced, party hack appointee.

Leon Panetta may not know very much about foreign affairs or defense matters. He is wholly unacquainted with the questions and quarrels that have roiled the U.S. intelligence community for a half century. But, as a veteran political warrior, he will do what President Obama expects of him.

Shiver me timbers...those meany Saudi Arabians are at it again! They are out to pirate a big price hike for a barrel of crude oil with their announcement of a huge OPEC production cut. And two other non-OPEC outsiders, Russia and Azerbaijan, also announced similar production cuts, in sympathy with the move of the Saudis.

In a quote from the New York Times, it was reported that..."Saudi Arabia, the world’s top exporter, issued a cut of 2.2 million barrels a day, or the equivalent of 2.5 percent of global production, to “bring things in balance,” according to the Saudi oil minister, Ali-al-Naimi" (unquote). 

OPEC and the oil ministers of the 11 nations, under the group's quota system, agreed to take a total of 4.2 million barrels a day off the market, the largest single production reduction in history.

Oh well; just when it looked like cheap, buck-n-a-half gas might be the remedy for an America mired in a debilitating, bone-rattling recession, we can instead look for prices to zoom back up to $2.50-3.00/gallon in the next 3-6 months or so, because OPEC is taking no chances: they've seen this "oil-oversupply" movie before, and they'll keep cutting production until the price gets back up to the 70 dollar-a-barrel level.

But what is most disturbing, is that Americans have also seen this exact same movie before in the 1990's, and learned ZILCH. Bill Clinton's presidency is widely regarded as the 'roaring 90's'. But Clinton was a leftist liberal, who luckily benefited from the perfect storm of falling oil prices, productivity gains of the computerized workplace, the explosive growth of the internet, and the concomitant dot-com job creation machine.

And in the eye of the perfect storm, was a republican Congress, who passed welfare reform, drilling in ANWAR, and a balanced budget-- and literally dragged a reluctant, kicking and screaming Bill Clinton, into a golden decade of prosperity.

But the Clinton administration made one of the most costly and long term damaging blunders in U.S. economic history, when slick Willie vetoed the congressional bill to initiate drilling in ANWAR. Back then, Mr. Clinton had 'succumbed' to the radical, Al Gore environmental lobby, and willingly danced at the end of the puppet strings of the Sierra Club.

But Clinton's 1995 veto didn't just restrict drilling in ANWAR. His lethal blunder set the stage for grievous long-term structural damage to the U.S. economy, due to the eventual result of the ban: a huge net capital outflow of  $700 billion annually to OPEC over the last decade, with no end in sight.

The veto also set the precedent for the current political-environmental insanity we have today, where 4 trillion dollars worth of American oil reserves have been declared to be both illegal, and also to be a supposed ecological disaster waiting to happen. 

What America stubbornly refuses to learn is that OPEC has directly affected the quality of our lives just as much as Congress, or any of the presidents or foreign wars in the last 40 years. Consider where America would be if ANWAR had come online in 2000, and the price of gas had stayed below a dollar-fifty/gallon. What then? Would we even be in a recession today?

Well, for starters, the U.S. would now be producing close to 50% of its domestic needs, rather than the current 30%. Instead, were importing 70% of our oil, and U.S. domestic production from aging oil fields is currently dropping at a rate of 2% a year. In just the next decade, we will be importing better than 80% of our oil, and falling further down into the unsustainable drain of our capital outflow to the foreign oil producers.

Currently, the United States remains a capital starved country. We produce practically nothing. We import almost everything. We are literally a debtor nation; and when it comes to our energy needs, we’ve been reduced to the status of a BEGGAR nation. Our economic fortunes are no longer in our own hands, but in those of the very people who despise our culture and way of life, and will do all they can to see us continue to falter.

And as a beggar nation, a once-proud America can only hope and beg for OPEC not to continue to short their production, and further burden the world's economy with yet another energy price shock, similar to the four dollar gas we saw as recently as last summer; and which is sure to return again--it's only a question of when.

But regarding our self-defeating energy policy, we're the nation of hope. We can only hope oil prices stay low. We can only hope that OPEC doesn't get any greedier. We can only hope that somehow, a new miraculous source of alternative energy will magically emerge to replace oil, and provide us with the hope for cheaper energy prices, and better times ahead. Yes, let's all just sit back, and keep on hoping for the best.

But hope is basically an excuse for DOING NOTHING.  And given the current political climate, it's what America does best...doing nothing but hoping, and watching our standard of living decline ever further, with every new tanker of foreign oil that docks within our ports.

But can their be any hope that America will see any relief from OPEC, when the politics of the country is so virulently against 'Big Oil'? Barack Obama, during his presidential campaign, cleverly was able to create a common enemy, the Exxon corporation, and constantly railed against "big oil" as though Exxon was being run by Lucifer himself. This political insanity of opposing domestic oil companies is only going to make a bad situation much worse, as the rest of the entire industrialized world seeks to develop new oil resources, while America is worried about turning back the oceans, and saving polar bears from drowning.

Perhaps Obama will consider a new State Department cabinet position-- the Secretary of Hope. This person would be in constant contact, and travel abroad to brownie-up the various OPEC heads of state, and tell the oil producers very nicely that... "We sure hope you don't lower your oil production!". This person would also be informing the Chinese that we hope they DO change their plans to horizontally drill offshore with their partner Cuba, and hope they DON'T suck our domestic reserves dry from underneath the Florida continental shelf just 60 miles offshore of OUR borders.

But goshdarn; it's just so much easier to hope, because reality seems so bleak. OPEC is out for OPEC. And the Chinese are out for China. They care not about America. They only seek what's best for their countries, and undoubtedly howl about the folly of the United States for restricting its own oil production for none other than blatantly insipid political reasons, like putting the prosperity of people subservient to the welfare of animals.

And because of the blunders beginning with Clinton, our OPEC "alliance" will continue to keep us over a barrel for the next decade or so, given the politics of the day, as the Obama Administration teams up with an expanded liberal majority in Congress. And this same majority will no doubt begin an all new, even more disastrous environmental assault on "Big Oil" in the next four years, and continue to enrich OPEC to the unnecessary detriment of our nation.

Every president faces international crises. Kennedy and the Cuban missiles. Johnson and the gulf of Tonkin; Nixon and the Pueblo incident; Ford and the Mayaguez crisis; Carter and the hostages; Reagan and Korean flight 007; Bush I and Saddam's Kuwait invasion; Clinton and Kosovo in the Balkans; Bush the 2nd and Sept 11. A president must be ready to answer the zero-hour call for either decisive action or inaction to avoid war.

Flashback to the election of '92. Clinton was being painted as unfit to be president, because of his pacifism and draft avoidance of the Vietnam war. But the "comeback kid" shrewdly replied that, "Franklin Roosevelt was a great commander-in-chief during World War II, and did not serve". Clinton went on to a spotty performance in the foreign policy crises of the Balkans, and Somalia. But he did grievous damage to our present military strength when he balanced the budget in his second term, committing the liberal sin of subordinating the military to social policy priorities.

Actually, Franklin Roosevelt was an effective wartime commander-in-chief, but he was more the administrative wizard rather than military master. His friend, Henry Stimson was appointed Secretary of War. Stimson's master stroke in appointing George Marshall, led to Marshall appointing Dwight Eisenhower. Stimson also presided over the Manhattan project. FDR led the nation to victory, but his historic leadership can be attributed mostly to his political astuteness. FDR seemed to have had that uncanny ability to navigate through the 4 year crisis without ever putting the ship of state on the rocks. But his one big Yalta blunder originated the cold war.

When Harry Truman assumed command in spring 1945, the Red Army was at the borders of Iran. Unlike Roosevelt, his steel-spined decisions were shaped during his days as a World War I artillery captain. Truman never backed down. Truman ordered Stalin to back off from the oil-rich country, or he would drop a 3rd atomic bomb right on top of the Soviet armies, who were massed at the Iranian border. Stalin complied. Truman also knew instinctively that the Korean War could have easily escalated into a third world war, and went for a stalemate- a politically unpopular decision that cost him re-election in '52.

Eisenhower proved to be a great peacetime president; but ironically, his greatest legacy was the result of his wartime experience in Germany. Mr. Eisenhower saw how mobility on the autobahns favored Nazi troop movements. This was his original intention in 1956 for constructing our invaluable interstate highway system. To this day, we continue to reap the economic benefits from Eisenhower's greatest peacetime accomplishment.

Question: Would John Kennedy have been able to back down the Russians in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis if he had not been an experienced World War II veteran? We'll never know. But everyone remembers how Kennedy's gut instincts called for force rather than negotiation with the Soviets. This is the essence of what any president does during any foreign crisis...deciding under pressure when much is at stake. This often separates the soldier presidents from the civilians. Do we fight or take flight?

Jimmie Carter may have been a nuclear engineer in the Navy, but his bungled appointment of his college roommate, Stansfield Turner, as head of the CIA in 1977 has had repercussions to this very day. The experienced CIA operatives back then resigned in droves rather than subordinate themselves to Turner, who knew nothing about spying. We lost most  of our Middle East agents on the ground back then, and the 1979 Iran hostage crisis began a domino effect of U.S. setbacks in the Middle East. Carter had zero wartime experience, and America has paid dearly for it ever since.

Ronald Reagan never fought in World War II , but he acted in war movies while living through the era. Reagan also understood the importance of absolute power and not backing down. Reagan had a poker face. By showing strength and decisiveness, he ended the cold war with the Soviets without firing a shot.

George Bush Senior was a World War II Navy pilot who was shot down and rescued during action in the Pacific. He proved to be a master coalition builder, and commander-in-chief during the first Gulf War. And he knew when to back off, and chose to stay within the borders of Kuwait after defeating Saddam in '91. History will always wonder what he could have accomplished during a second term.

George Bush II also avoided the Vietnam war by serving in the Air National Guard. He got the nation into the quagmire in Iraq chiefly by appointing buddy-buddy Don Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld saw to it that the war was under-funded, under-supplied, and under-manned. Only the intervention, war experience, and fortitude of Senator John McCain saved the nation from a possible involvement in an all-out civil war there. 

McCain constantly badgered Rumsfeld for more weapons, more soldiers, more armor, and a different command structure. He convinced Bush that we could win with 50,000 more troops. Whether elected or not, he will eventually standout in history as having saved the U.S. from a possible humiliation a hundred times worse than Vietnam, because it would have alerted the enemy that America always eventually backs down politically at home, if only they suffer enough soldier casualties abroad. The Islamic radicals are well aware of our great disadvantage...we value the lives of our soldiers. To us life isn't cheap as it is to them, with their unlimited cadre of ready-to-die suicide bombers.

We are a nation of Christian principles and freedom; polar opposites to the ones who oppose us. And John McCain knows this. The Vietnamese were no different. The enemy will lie during negotiations, and will not back down unless forced. They have no values. Only the desire to destroy us.

But is Barack Obama aware of their principles? Does he believe that conflicts should be fair? Would he be his own man in command, or basically just use the Joint Chiefs as subcontractors for all his military decisions to either back down, fight, or negotiate?

Is McCain the next Harry Truman? And is Obama the next Jimmie Carter? History always repeats itself, and leopards never change their spots. America is at an electoral crossroads. Will we turn right this November, or vote to make a hard left?