Cut 'Em All Loose

Well, Mr. President-elect, despite our fondest wishes to see banana-republic scofflaws such as National Intelligence poobah Mike McConnell and CIA director Michael Hayden booted right out on the street, perhaps you should, after all, retain their professional services a while longer.

Because these boys are indeed crack intelligence men, the chief evidence of which is just now coming to light.

To wit, the Washington Post reports: Both McConnell and Hayden "interpret the Obama team not reaching out to them as a sign that they will not be kept on."

You think?

It's hard to believe, but not only do both men wish to remain, they both thought there was some realistic chance that they could, and would.

Like a high-school go-between in a star-crossed romance, a Bush administration official peddled on their behalf what they say is their best case: Obama, the self-interested theory goes, is "going to have his hands full dealing with what has become a full-blown economic crisis, so he may want to keep some steady, experienced hands at the helm in the national security arena, at least for a while."

It's also reported they're privately making another argument -- and this one, coming from anyone inside the incestuously corrupt Bush administration, is an even a greater, mind-bending lulu: "[B]oth think that their early departures could be seen as politicizing their offices."

When I first read that, my immediate reaction was precisely that of the little knee-slapping character in the "You want it when?" cartoon that festoons the walls of so many retail-service operations.

Almost unbelievably, a few Congressional Democrats say they wouldn't mind seeing McConnell and Hayden keep their nameplates on their doors, arguing that the two men helped "restor[e] stability and professionalism to a community rocked by multiple scandals in recent years."

Saner heads among the Democratic caucus, however -- and one member of the Senate intelligence committee called this a "consensus" -- question the "professionalism" argument. Because here's the recent, anticonstitutional history of their intelligence careers:

"Both … publicly defended the use of 'extraordinary' interrogation measures," otherwise known as torture.

And "Hayden, a former head of the National Security Agency, was in charge of the nation's electronic eavesdropping when the White House ordered warrantless surveillance of some U.S.-based communications," otherwise known as a felony.

Yeah, Obama should retain them all right. In Leavenworth.

Chuck Hagel has been suggested as a successor to either position, National Intelligence or CIA director, but his name is also being bandied about -- especially by progressives -- as a desirable replacement for Defense Secretary Bob Gates.

This puzzles and even disturbs, since a Republican pick for the defense slot would be a tacit admission by Democrats that only a Republican can handle the rough stuff of national security, just as Republicans have farcically argued for years. Let's put that one to bed, OK?

And of course there's the nagging question of just how long Mr. Gates may, in fact, be hanging around as defense secretary. At first his retention was but a rumored idea, which instantly led to some explosive pushback from Obama's left. Now I read that Gates' continued employment, though for only six months or so, is perhaps a done deal in the mind of Obama's transition team, although this also could be but more boot-camp scuttlebutt.

If not, permit me, ladies and gentlemen of transitional doings, to suggest with less elegance than emotion that you have lost your ever-lovin' minds.

It's true that Gates never subscribed to Bush-Cheney's comic-book Weltanschauung of world domination, and it's also true he was a vast improvement over the psychotically poetic droppings of Donald Rumsfeld.

But give us a break, and I mean that literally: a clean, surgical break from all things Bushian.

If you want to go bipartisan, do it at Commerce, or Transportation, or Agriculture (maybe some bored Republican senator from a purple state with a Democratic governor?) -- anywhere but Defense, or State, or Justice, the cabinet triumvirate of the Bush crime family.