Good Men Always Leave ... Bush

Not only has GWB managed to keep and encourage incompetence around him (I've got my Manson lamps trained on you, Condi, Paulie, and Donnie.), he has pushed away, excluded, humiliated and insulted others who have shown competence and effort in moving policy forward.

First, there was John J. DiIulio Jr., who headed up the President's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives for about 6 months. He left for the pat "family and personal reasons," but later wrote to reporter Ron Suskind of Esquire in October 2002, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus.... "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." See the full article here. (Given my previous post, I don't think Machiavelli would very much approve of this administration.) Smears and threats ensued. We move on to...

Next came Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, who had made a name for himself getting to know Bono and actually seeming to care about debt in the developing world. He was fired from the administration in December 2002. O'Neill told Ron Suskind (Hey! It's That Reporter Guy!) in their collaborative book, The Price of Loyalty:

In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.” (Source: CBS News 60 Minutes, January 11, 2004)

So what happens? O'Neill is smeared, and accused of releasing classifed documents. Anything come of that? Nope.

Next we hear from Richard Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies, and in his riveting testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Clarke said in a March 20, 2004, 60 Minutes interview, " I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on the Cold War issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back, they wanted to work on the same issues right away -- Iraq, Star Wars -- not the new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years." What happened to Clarke? Yup! Personal attacks and smears.

Moving along to...military leaders, such as General Eric Shinseki, a four-star Army Chief of Staff, who had the gall to at least be mildly optimistic (but realistic) when estimating that we would need 300,000 troops to invade Iraq. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld went on to publicly rebuke Shinseki and humiliate him by announcing his successor 1 1/2 years before his term was up. As James Fallows noted in a Frontline interview:

When Paul Wolfowitz was asked why he thought Shinseki's estimates were so wildly off the mark, first he used the sort of standard Pentagon line, especially under Donald Rumsfeld, which was really, "The future was unknowable." Of course the future is unknowable, although that line was used to excuse a failure to give any financial estimates, which was more irresponsible than it was unknowable.

Then he went on to say, first, he thought many things would go fairly easily. Countries like France were likely to help us in the reconstruction, that this was likely to go more easily than most people thought. Then he went on to make the crucial point that raised the main philosophical difference between the Army and the civilian leadership. Wolfowitz said he found it hard to conceive that it would be harder to occupy Iraq than it had been to conquer it. This was a thing that was difficult to imagine, he said.

Far from being an imaginary concept, this idea that the occupation was the hard part was the heart of the Army's prewar argument.

Where else to go for people who have abandoned Bush? John Eisenhower, son of a GOP President. Foreign service officers, both Democrat and Republicans. Lots of military leaders (OK, a lot of these guys were never WITH Bush -- work with me people). Families of 9/11 victims.

Bush clearly cannot handle the truth. Faith-based policy, indeed. Now of course, the administration disses its own State Department's intelligence and the CIA. Or distorts them mightily to make their point.