{"id":23126,"date":"2011-04-29T14:41:23","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T18:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=23126"},"modified":"2011-04-29T14:41:23","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T18:41:23","slug":"panetta-a-good-pick-for-secdef","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=23126","title":{"rendered":"Panetta: A Good Pick For SecDef?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I attended a small town hall event for Congressmen Ben Quayle<\/a> sponsored by “Sun Devils for Israel”, a pro-Israel ASU student group. First of all, I want to say I was really impressed by Quayle’s knowledge of foreign policy issues. Even though the event was supposed to be focused primarily on American-Israeli relations, a lot of questions were asked about his opinions on the uprisings in the Middle East, China, and the changes to the President’s national security team. He didn’t duck those questions and delivered articulate and\u00a0thorough\u00a0responses. I think the guy has gotten a bad rap primarily because of his last name \u00a0and because of some stuff he posted on a trashy website four years<\/a> ago. Additionally, he is building a pretty conservative voting record.<\/p>\n

Anyways, I asked a question about how the culture of State Department is often very left-wing and anti-American. In his response, he brought up some of the changes being made to Obummer’s national security team and mentioned he thought Panetta had done well as head of the CIA. I was surprised by this considering Quayle’s past statements about President Obama<\/a> and wasn’t expecting praise for Obama’s choice for Gates’s replacement. Quayle is not the first Republican to praise Panetta either. Peter King, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Mike Rogers of Michigan, and other Republicans (including some whom you would not consider RINOs or moderates) have jumped on board the Panetta bandwagon.<\/p>\n

When Panetta was nominated to head the CIA in 2009, I was initially worried that Panetta was sent to CIA to gut the organization and conduct a purge of critical personnel similar to what we saw in the 1970s. However, as CIA chief, Panetta has advocated the continuation of drone strikes, increased the number CIA paramilitary operations, and most importantly, fought against torture investigations that would have harmed the CIA. So, in short, I was wrong about Panetta.<\/p>\n

Today, many are making the same\u00a0assumptions\u00a0about Panetta at the Pentagon. Particularly, that he is being moved to the Pentagon to help implement Obummer’s defense budget cuts<\/a>. But could he turn out to be a fierce defender of the Pentagon, just like he was a fierce defender of the CIA, and fight Obummer’s cuts? Or will he tow the administration line? You tell me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I attended a small town hall event for Congressmen Ben Quayle sponsored by “Sun Devils … Panetta: A Good Pick For SecDef?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}