Friday, April 27, 2007

I'm shocked, shocked to discover the Bush Administration is incompetent

...and yet it never occurs to these people to resign on principle and tell America the truth, oh, when it matters?

Especially precious is George Tenet's discovery that, in fact, loyalty in the Bush White House runs entirely one-way. There's a fantastic element in James Risen's State of War that basically says the Tenet-Bush relationship was forged immediately after 9/11, when Bush effectively save Tenet's job by taking personal responsibility for any intelligence failures. (Rhetorically, he took responsibility. In reality, he just kept being Bush.) So Tenet was so grateful for keeping his job, he basically let Cheney and Rumsfeld run right over the CIA, just to keep the boss-man happy.

And then he was thrown overboard like rotting meat when it became convenient to do so.
“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
No surprise there. Indeed, this has already been said in as many words by Paul O'neill in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty. The difference between now and then, I suppose, is that Bush's approval ratings are half what they were then. Oh, that and a Democratically-controlled Congress.

Let's see what develops from this.

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