What Mike Pompeo Should Have Said

I hope you enjoyed the bizarre moment in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on the nomination of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  Intelligence in general, and the CIA in particular, is an awesome topic these days as we are being attacked in the air (9-11), on land (San Bernardino, Orlando, Boston), in cyberspace (China, Russia, North Korea and our friends as well), and who knows where-all else.

We need to know about our enemies and their thoughts, their plans, and their motivations.  We need signal intelligence, communications intelligence and, as important as any, human intelligence.  We need to do it surreptitiously and do it well, and gain as much knowledge as possible.  And we need sound leadership to make that happen.

Accordingly, it was imperative that the Senate committee questioning Rep. Pompeo on his qualifications focus on his views on these issues and his capabilities to do the job.  It is vital that they gain that confidence that the person selected to direct the CIA knows his stuff.

And then there was Kamala Harris.

You have probably not heard of Kamala Harris, but she is the junior senator from the Peoples' Republic State of California, latest in a long line of forgettable leftists, who remind us how glad we are that each state gets two senators regardless of size.  She has been a senator for a freaking week, for God's sake.  But she is on this committee and got her five minutes of questions in.

Were they about the vital role of intelligence in fighting our enemies abroad, or about Rep. Pompeo's qualifications and understanding of its role in protecting the USA?

Well, no.

Kamala Harris, the week-long senator from California, used her five minutes of questions to ask Rep. Pompeo about -- honk if you guessed it -- global warming and hiring gays at the CIA.  I'm serious.  I was driving yesterday listening to the hearings, and when she started asking questions I thought that Fox had switched over to the hearings for the director of NOAA or OPM or some other agency.

Unfortunately I was listening on the radio and couldn't see Rep. Pompeo's face to see his expression.  Mike Pompeo has been around the block a few times, and he had to be laughing his butt off inside.  Of course, having indeed been around the block a few times, he knew to keep his composure and simply toss out a reasonable answer ... "We will not discriminate; we will follow the laws on hiring ...", you know, that sort of thing.  He answered the global warming question as blandly and forgettably; that he could answer at all without laughing is a credit to him.

Of course, Rep. Pompeo had to answer politely given the context.  I would not have been so gentle, especially if I knew I had 51 votes in my pocket.  And I would have given my final answer this way.

"Senator Harris, I appreciate your concern about whether or not it is getting a bit warmer out there.  And when you have been in your office longer than a week, and all your boxes are unpacked, you will come to discover that the reason we have over 3,000 appointed positions in the Federal government is because there is a lot going on here -- including some areas which I believe are outside the purview of the Federal government and should not even be a concern of ours.

"As CIA Director, I will have the leadership of an organization that is the point of the spear as far as staying ahead of organizations that want to bring down our nation and literally kill our citizens -- and there are a lot of them.  I will be doing that 24 hours a day and it will not be enough.  I will be constantly seeking ways to improve our ability to gain insights into our enemies and improve the accuracy and reliability of the data that we provide to those who use it to set policy.

"My job will be the same in the minus-50 degree temperatures of Siberia and in the plus-120 degree desert of Iraq.  Whatever those agencies of government may feel about the extent to which they can and should influence global temperatures, I have a job which I feel needs to be done no matter what the temperature -- and what may be our obligation to do anything about it.

"I realize you have to represent the purported views of your constituents and have every right to do that.  But I will clearly state that, as you are sitting in judgment of my candidacy and my capability, I am, as I sit here today, a member of the House of Representatives of three terms and otherwise beginning a fourth, I am qualified to advise you as well, and I will point out that you have embarrassed the citizens of the great State of California by spurning the opportunity to discuss either my qualifications or understanding of intelligence gathering, in favor of issues that are completely outside the realm of the Agency I am being considered to lead."

I would have applauded, and the Twitterverse would have exploded.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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