Know the Difference

The Obama administration has great difficulty in differentiating between success and failure on a wide range of issues. This lack of discernment comes up about every time an employment figure comes out- the new number surprises (and generally not one of those pleasant surprises either- as was the case this week with the anticipated success of job gains turning into the failure of 85,000 jobs lost). On life and death matters this administration is equally befuddled with conflicting statements emerging from the President himself starting with the Christmas day attack being an isolated incident to grudgingly and slowly with modified statement after statement two weeks later admitting that it had been an al Qaeda orchestrated plot, to a hapless Homeland Security Secretary who initially heralded that every thing had worked as it should in what was a total and abysmal security failure. Even this morning, George Stephanopoulos was serving as an apologist for Leon Panetta who stated in a Washington Post piece Saturday that the CIA was "not lax" in permitting a massacre that killed seven of his personnel in Afghanistan. If this is not abject failure, what would be? So does Panetta construe this disaster as success? Stephanopoulos said any firings in the wake of this tragedy would damage Agency morale. Is the CIA not already demoralized with potential prosecutions rising against agents for their conduct that was endorsed by the last Bush administration by Attorney General Holder and company (with the blessing no doubt of Obama himself)? How can the rank and file of the CIA have any confidence in Leon Panetta who has never served previously as an intelligence professional and who has not vigorously defended his agency from criticism and even prosecution by other parts of the Obama administration and who has not acquitted himself well in daily leadership with the professionals there? Unfortunately, there are no "Wild Bill" Donovans or Bill Caseys or Jim Angletons on the horizon to fill the breach and assume leadership, and even if there were, Obama would never hire such iron-spined, calculating patriots.