hunting and killing. because john brennan has been so involved in the killing part of the cia, of counterterrorism operations since 9/11, is it kind of a nixon goes to china moment, by putting him in charge of the cia right now, give up some of those capacities. is it possible he s there because he has the credibility to say i m not a softy, i m not afraid of killing people. he certainly has the president s support. he s one of president obama s closest advisers. what he does and advocates would be considered to have a blessing of the white house. there are constituencies in the cia to want to dial back some of the operations and to go back to the espionage intelligence analysis that they ve been doing traditionally because they realize there s opportunity costs. as you put in the set-up piece,
into, which you said very well with the history, the cia has this history where they get pushed and pulled in different directions and it starts out as an espionage service an one president or another wants to push them into covert war and then there s this period of the church committee and retributions and retrenchment and then they re accused of being risk aversed and then 9/11 happens and they go back tht other direction. so we ve been this the period for significant 12 years, where the agency has changed into this organization. and as an organization, even prior the cia being the cia, have always done some form of covert action. in the cyclical mix, but we did see such a dramatic swinging back in the other direction with the church committee and those other reforms, i can t imagine that happening now. what the cia is doing now isn t
issues than we are used to seeing the organized left take on democrats, so what happens next? in order to figure out, it maybe makes more sense to talk to a republican than a democrat since republicans have had to right the book and democrats for a long time now have not had to worry about that. steve schmidt joins us now. steve, does it make you happy to see fist yelling at democrats? make t me a little bit happy. makes me happy that the president s put a budget forward where we re going to have some reality when we talk about what we re going to do with these entitlement programs so they re around in the next generation and when you see the congressman from wisconsin speaking tr, i think he s engaging in almost sheer demagoguery. let s see what the president s proposal is and hopefully, there s an ability to work across party lines to come up with a solution to strengthen
tdd: 1-800-345-2550 call, click or visit to start banking with schwab bank today. that faint sound you hear in the distance, i think it s the left. right now, the organized left with allowing themselves to be heard in washington, d.c. in protest of the president s anticipated proposal to reduce social security benefits. that proposal will be released tomorrow as part of the president s budget blueprint, but it was leaked last week and the way it was refed was not well received on either side. on the right, john boehner said
so when your own base turns against you, when you re headed into midterm elections, when you have the difficult negotiating partner with the republican congress, the angry base, hearing in them, will make a lot of democratic members of congress very skittish. make democratic senators skittish and they may communicate back to the white house, look, we re not going to walk the plank on this. we have to run an election in november. and that s the parallel with the harriet myers in the second term, it s fascinating and i wonder if the republicans now look at that and see president obama as being in the same boat. when they think about republican policy objectives an of course, republicans want to cut entitlements, wouldn t they be better off working with the president in his own base rather than saying no? are they looking at the republicans and sayinging no, we