You Will Learn To Genuflect And You Will Respect Me

Amazing what a relentless campaign of delegitimation and politicization yields. Jeff Stein finds that there’s a lot of CIA support for Obama:

After years of derision and insults from neoconservatives who coalesced in the Bush administration, old hands say, they’re getting their revenge.

“I think a lot of the intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, has been pissed off at the neoconservatives, going back to first Red Team effort,” a group of 1970s-era hawks that challenged the Carter administration’s CIA estimates on Soviet weapons, says a national security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“There’s been a longstanding distrust by conservatives of the intelligence community and particularly the CIA,” he said, asking not to be identified because he occupies a sensitive position. 

Yes, why would this be, I wonder. After being left holding the bag for Iraq and for torture and being told at every conceivable moment by the right that it’s incompetent for not reaffirming the conservative worldview — never mind the fact that CIA’s Mideast analysts correctly predicted the Iraqi insurgency and refused to say that Saddam Hussein had any meaningful connection to Usama bin Laden — it’s pretty easy to see why CIA would look leftward to the candidate that wouldn’t appoint cabinet officials who hate the institution. The only question is why everyone in the CIA isn’t prepared to reject the right.