Buddy Hackett look-alike Leon Panetta, who just stepped into Uncle Bob Gates’ old billet in America’s Pentarchy*, is taking the ethnic joke into a new era. He spent his first greet-and-grip trip abroad eating his foot, saying more stupid things into microphones per minute of exposure than George W. Bush ever did, and shrugged it all off in an MSNBC interview with “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?”
Tell me you’re not really the frickin’ Secretary of Defense, Uncle Leo. Moe, Larry and the Holy Ghost. Where do we find such bureaucratic twits?
Panetta began his government career as an Army intelligence officer during the Vietnam War. Officers in other combat branches of the service have to be able to fly airplanes or drive ships or lead frightened young men in desperate attacks against machine gun nests and other risky business of that sort. The only requirement for becoming an intelligence officer is to never quite know what the hell you’re talking about. Panetta was discharged from after one two-year tour as a first lieutenant and awarded an Army Commendation Medal, a medal normally given to junior enlisted and officer personnel for not getting caught masturbating in the middle of the parade ground at high noon. (Fair disclosure: in the course of my career I received six Navy Commendation Medals, which shows you how good I was at not getting caught).
Military intelligence is to the military and intelligence what McDonald’s is to food. By New American Century standards, his short tenure as an Army spy alone more than qualified Uncle Leo to grow up to become head of America’s top spy agency as well as the country’s minister of war.
http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/07/preview-hes-idiot-what-frick-can-he.html