Roger Simon: "The Democrats' Russian Sex Change Operation"

What does this tell us about Barack Obama?

Brennan — it is well known and he admits it — voted for Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election. Talk about sex change operations. He excuses that as kind of youthful indiscretion — he was in his early twenties — and evidently many (including Obama, who gave him his job) believed him or said they did.

But I was only a few years older than Brennan then and remember those days well, since I too was on the left. I was even an acquaintance of such notorious characters as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and knew dozens of people who, to one degree or another, sympathized with them. Yet not a single person I can recall voted for Gus Hall or even remotely considered it. Hall was a Stalinist, for crissakes! He was anathema, everything the young people of the so-called New Left were rebelling against then — and, in this one case at least, justifiably so. The mass-murdering crimes of Stalin were already common knowledge.

Years later, when I read Brennan was among the minuscule .07 percent who actually voted for Hall, I was astonished. How could such a person end up director of the CIA? I mean, I'm all for redemption and everything, but there are limits. Voting for a Stalinist candidate as late as 1976 would be akin to a personality disorder, almost like voting for Satan. It's one thing to forgive Brennan for this, hard as that may be, but there is something seriously unsettling about putting him at the helm of our most famous intelligence agency. (Other questions have arisen about Brennan's Middle East connections.)

But now we have him leading the charge against Trump, accusing the president of actual treason in his dealings with Putin, the very thing Brennan's former hero Hall directly advocated. It's enough to make a sane man paranoid.