When the going gets tough, what do the tough do? Blame somebody else. There is something deeply disturbing about the inability of anybody in power to take responsibility for their mistakes. Over at Vanity Fair, many of the neoconservative architects behind the Iraq War - the same naive folks who declared it would be a "cake-walk" - now blame the failure of the war on Bush's incompetence. While I certainly don't want to defend Bush's competence, I sincerely doubt that the current miasma we find ourselves in is simply a result of poor follow through. Rather, I think the plan itself - the utopian notion that we could engineer democracy via pre-emptive action - was really to blame. Until neo-conservatives accept the error of their own ideas (and it's hard to think of a more resounding falsification than the Iraq war), they don't stand a chance of fixing them.
That said, it certainly is fun watching the conservatives cannibalize each other. My favorite quote comes from David Frum, former Bush speechwriter and author of "The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House":
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
Comments (4)
What does this have to do with Cannabis?
Posted by: coturnix | November 3, 2006 9:46 PM