But the truth is that the CIA is badly broken. Exactly. The Church Committee and Jimmy Carter badly damaged the CIA, the leadership hired a bunch of Ivy League liberals to fill the ranks, Clinton screwed it up even worse, and now we get Leon Panetta. Unfortunately, Bush did nothing to fix any of the problems, and he dealt with intelligence failures by piling bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy--hardly the best way to fix the problems.
So, yes, Panetta is a lousy choice. But it's not clear that he's worse than, for instance, George Tenet. Or Valerie Plame. Or all those other top guys in the Agency who leak to the NY Times and the Washington Post.