Tuesday, October 25, 2005

ET TU, SUNUNU ?

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One could almost feel sorry for the pathetic under-equipped would-be tyrant. Well, maybe not "almost;" maybe two or three steps before almost. Timothy Noah has a funny little story in SLATE today about more Repugs kicking Bushie when he's down. This time it's another of his father's old cronies, ex-White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, joining former George I National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in helping Americans understand that we have the absolutely worst-run government in the history of our country.


UPDATE: MORE AND MORE REPUBLICANS ABANDONING BUSH-- WITH EITHER A SENSE OF REAL PATRIOTISM OR A SENSE OF REAL MALICE. YOU DECIDE.

My good friend Harry is always urging me to read the L.A. TIMES. I don't always but I did today. If you missed it, you missed a follow-up by former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson on why he put the word "cabal" stage center in current political discourse and why he sums up Bush's foreign policy as "ruinous." He claims the secretive cabal (WHIG), lead by Cheney and Rumsfeld, made virtually all the decisions regarding the country's national security, including everything that involved Iraq. In a catty slap at Bush himself, Wilkerson obliquely referred to Bush's... um... lazy mind and lower-than-average IQ, writing "I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less." Gee, these Republicans really go after each other when they get mad. He adds that "more often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal."

He adds that right at the heart of our government this little-known cabal's "insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and 'guardians of the turf.' But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well."

He doesn't let up. You wanna read it?

3 Comments:

At 6:02 PM, Blogger Timcanhear said...

I just wonder why Scowcroft didn't speak up like the rest of us did before bush made a mess.
It's what I admire about Senator Kennedy. He stood with a small number of people in opposing
this absurd way to deal with terrorism. This thing called war.
Let's hope up and coming guys like Paul Hackett are real. We can't afford much more of this nonsense.

 
At 8:29 AM, Blogger KenInNY said...

In fairness, Scowcroft DID speak up, quite pointedly, during the runup to the invasion. For anyone who was paying attention, it was quite shocking--especially considering the likelihood, given Scowcroft's close personal relationship with the president's father, that his remarks had at least been run past, if not actually cleared by, GHWB.

Unfortunately, as we all recall, the media had criminally little interest in views that challenged the neocon orthodoxy about Iraq, and Scowcroft didn't have either the personality type or the stamina to make himself a Lonely Crusader. Remember, this is a guy who's accustomed to being a confidential insider. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he's chosen now to speak as forcefully as he did in the New Yorker interview about the incompetence of the GWB admistration. Talking about the piece to Al Franken, The New Yorker's Rick Herzberg speculated that it has something to do with Scowcroft's turning 80.

And again, there's the interesting question, as a matter of personal loyalty (which actually mattered to the old-style conservatives), would Scowcroft have gone so vociferously public without at least giving his old pal GHWB a heads-up?

K

 
At 1:30 PM, Blogger Timcanhear said...

keninny,
Thanks for revealing that Scowcroft DID speak up before the launch of the war. Ok, then who's to blame for "we the people" not knowing it? Once again, our lame ass media. Does anyone know where today's crock pot of media reporters is graduating from?

 

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