PAYBACK – AT 10:53 A.M. ET:  Has Barack Obama thrown the wrong people under the bus?  Britain's Daily Mail reports on a backlash from officials in the intelligence community:

Barack Obama was accused of double standards yesterday in his treatment of the CIA.
The President paid tribute to secret agents after seven of them were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said the CIA had been ‘tested as never before’ and that agents had ‘served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century’.
He lauded the victims as ‘part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens and for our way of life’.

Yet the previous day he had blasted ‘systemic failures’ in the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Christmas Day syringe bomb attack.

The president is probably right about the "systemic failures."  But his long history of blaming anybody but himself has prompted a backlash.

‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’

And...

The agents – including the chief of the base, a mother-of-three - were collecting information about militants when the suicide bomber struck on Wednesday.
The attack was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.

And let us not forget that Attorney General Eric Holder, who thinks this is one big law-enforcement problem, wants to investigate the actions of CIA agents under the BUSH (!!) administration.

Do you see chickens coming home to roost?  There's an army of them across the road...and these chickens vote.

January 2, 2010