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Once again, a prominent liberal Democrat is projecting his sordid political tactics and those of his party on the opposition. In an interview for next month's issue of The New Yorker magazine, CIA Director Leon Panetta asserted that former Vice-President Dick Cheney might welcome another major terrorist attack on America, as a means of validating his criticism of misguided Obama Administration "security" policies.

Cheney has had the entire liberal cabal up in arms, ever since his May 21 speech to the American Enterprise Institute in which he bluntly warned of the dangers posed by Obama's naive and ideologically driven decisions relating to the terror war. Cheney flatly explained how those policies are putting America at risk. Worse yet, at least from the liberal perspective, ever since his commentary, Cheney's popularity among the American people has risen dramatically. Consequently, the Democrats view him as a bigger danger than Al Qaeda or a nuclear Iran.

One might expect that, in response to Cheney, Panetta might have simply expounded on the new and improved safeguards implemented by Obama and his cronies since inauguration day. Instead, he sought to vilify Cheney's very motive for speaking out, despite the irrelevancy of that motive as a factor in accurately assessing the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Obama's "security" program. But Panetta and his puppet masters clearly revealed their highest priority as the need to undermine Cheney's personal credibility in the process.

Worse yet, such extreme defensiveness, and the scenario to which it alludes, likely reveals a prevailing nervousness within the Obama Administration to the effect that, in the event of a terror strike, Cheney's warnings might stick. This is a political liability that Obama knows he and his cabinet could not afford. And the magnitude of the response, indicating that they are already in "damage control" mode, is proof that the Obama facade is indeed in the initial stages of collapse.

Recalling events throughout the past sixteen years that led up to the current state of affairs, it is obvious that liberals view any and every situation primarily, perhaps exclusively, from the standpoint of its potential for political gain or loss. Bill Clinton, throughout the 1990s, was wholly indifferent to the burgeoning Islamist threat, only addressing them, on those occasions when he did so, from a perspective of their usefulness to distract America from his other personal problems.

Thus, "retaliatory" cruise missile strikes were ordered against empty terrorist camps on the same day Monica Lewinsky testified before Ken Starr, captured terror "suspects" were dealt with in the judicial swamplands of American courts, and no coherent plan was ever devised to neutralize the emerging danger. Even more deplorable were the actions of Clinton Administration officials such as Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who did not merely ignore the problem but, at the behest of Clinton, erected barriers to any effective analysis of intelligence information that might have alerted the right people to the imminence of the attacks that did indeed result.

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