Ugh oh! Seems like the replacement is a bad one :(

Wonkette writes: "How twisted is this country? An Iran-Contra crook and ex-CIA chief is immediately greeted as a sane, grown-up yet “fresh” replacement for the delusional old Donald Rumsfeld.

Even more fun, Gates’ nemesis Daniel Ortega was elected president of Nicaragua on Monday. You may remember Ortega as the Sandinista leader who fought off the Contras in a long bloody “civil war” in large part engineered by … Oliver North, William Casey and deputy CIA director Robert M. Gates, among others. North, a convicted felon and official fall guy for Iran-Contra, was in Nicaragua last week campaigning against Ortega.

History doesn’t just repeat itself; it repeats itself with the same exact people."

and of course, Kissinger likes him, so this can't be good :( could we please get someone from this century, not the 60's! (or at least not involved in Iran-contra!)



Three witnesses testified that Mr. Gates slanted intelligence analysis as a senior agency official in the 1980's, while two others defended him. . . .Mr. Gates's detractors assert that the slanting of intelligence was largely confined to issues involving the Soviet Union, Soviet expansionism and C.I.A. covert operations. . . .

The most dramatic testimony came from Melvin A. Goodman, a former division chief in Soviet affairs. He accused Mr. Gates of imposing his political judgments on intelligence analyses without any evidence to back his views, of suppressing his analysts' conclusions, of corrupting the agency's stringent analytical process and of misusing personnel -- "judge shopping the courthouse," Mr. Goodman called it -- until the desired analysis was produced.

But the more reflective testimony of another witness, Harold Ford, although less explosive than Mr. Goodman's, could carry more weight with the committee. Mr. Ford, a 30-year veteran of the agency who has extensively written and lectured on ethics in public policy, described his personal agony before deciding that out of loyalty to the agency, he could not support the nominee.