Dick Cheney vs. Leon Panetta

CIA Director Leon Panetta has reverted to “Democratic Party attack dog,” said John Hinderaker in Power Line, with his “sensational (and libelous) allegation” in The New Yorker that “it’s almost as if” Dick Cheney is “wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point” that Obama is making America less safe. The obvious reason for Cheney’s pushback on Obama’s national security policies is that he doesn’t want the U.S. attacked.

If you look at Panetta’s comment “without any examination or thinking,” said Jimmy Orr in The Christian Science Monitor, he could be arguing that Cheney has "a giant foam ‘we’re No. 1' finger on his hand cheering for the Taliban.” In fact, he’s responding off-the-cuff to Cheney’s just-delivered speech trashing Obama. Of course, context hasn’t kept the media from losing their minds over this “imaginary battle between Panetta and Cheney.”

If only Panetta’s “disgusting” and “moronic” remark could be dismissed so easily, said Andy McCarthy in National Review. After eight years of Democrats “politicizing our national security, on an unprecedented scale,” the only news is that Panetta isn’t the Democratic “adult” I mistook him for. If Cheney didn’t care about his public image when the Left was “turning him into Darth Vader,” why would he now want Americans to die to score a public point?

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Maybe he can dish it out but can’t take it, said Kathy Kattenburg in Comments From Left Field. Cheney “is, in fact, suggesting that Obama will be to blame for any new terrorist attacks on U.S. soil”—how else can you read his warnings that Obama is endangering the U.S.?—so he’s in no position to “get all self-righteous” when Panetta points out that he’s “positioning himself to gloat.”