Wow! Toughest words I've ever seen

Frank Rich had this to say about the Nomination of General Hayden

"If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too."

Here's the link to the NYTimes Article, via Digby link here

Digby suggests that with words this tough, Frank is a candidate for an all-expense-paid tropical vacation in Cuba, courtesy of the the Department of Homeland Security.

Here's another gem from the article:

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

Wow! Just wow....

Those of us who spend time on the web or the "fever swamp" of the blogosphere have known these things to be the truth for some time....but now, thanks to the circulation of the NY Times, the rest of the country is finding out.

That being said, however, you would never know the danger, banality, or just plain stupidity of appointing Hayden to oversee the CIA if you listened to the Sunday morning talk shows. "Leading Democrats" like Biden and Jane Harmon were both so "mealy-mouthed" that you would think they were personally invested in Hayden's nomination.