This one begins with another installment of CronyWatch. You would think that, after so many allegations of cronyism, not to mention so many scandals involving intelligence matters and their oversight, even a dumbass would figure out that the people appointed to watch the intelligence community's doings should be sharp, cynical, independents and mavericks who will question everything. No yes-men need apply, surely...
From Newsweek:
President Bush last week appointed nine campaign contributors, including three longtime fund-raisers, to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a 16-member panel of individuals from the private sector who advise the president on the quality and effectiveness of U.S. intelligence efforts.
...Bush reappointed William DeWitt, an Ohio businessman who has raised more than $300,000 for the president’s campaigns, for a third two-year term on the panel. Originally appointed in 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, DeWitt, who was also a top fund-raiser for Bush’s 2004 Inaugural committee, was a partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Other appointees included former Commerce secretary Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend; Texas oilman Ray Hunt; Netscape founder Jim Barksdale, and former congressman and 9/11 Commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton. Like DeWitt, Evans and Hunt have also been longtime Bush fund-raisers, raising more than $100,000 apiece for the president’s campaigns. Barksdale and five other appointees—incoming chairman Stephen Friedman, former Reagan adviser Arthur Culvahouse, retired admiral David Jeremiah, Martin Faga and John L. Morrison—were contributors to the president’s 2004 re-election effort.
This is a board which has top-level access, both to Bush and to highly secret material. Even its own reports are marked as classified. So why pack it with a bunch of cronies? Is it simple stupidity or is there an agenda?
Well, maybe Jim Hoagland writing an open letter to Bush in the Washington Post, has the reason:
That is the larger point about your responsibility for letting the Wilson molehill become a mountain. You set the tone. To figure out what they should do, your subordinates study the statements and decisions you make -- and the bureaucratic conflicts you leave open and simmering and unresolved to leach away the presidential authority you so covet. You have let official secrecy become an end in itself, a positive value rather than a necessary evil to be used sparingly in an open society.
It is not surprising that your White House distrusts and/or despises the media, the CIA, the State Department's career officers, the United Nations and a host of other institutions that you could not control, but that you could not accept that you could not control. Like most paranoia, yours is not totally unfounded: People in those institutions were out to defy and/or get you.
But you and yours helped them accomplish the mission. One lesson available in this story is that amateurs are no match for the CIA in disinformation campaigns. The spies are far better at operating in the shadows than you politicians will ever be. They have a license to dissemble.
The hidden management of the criminal justice process and the news media practiced by spooks in Wilson-Rove-Libbygate is nothing short of brilliant. So you were right to fear the agency. Where else do you think the one-page crime report that triggered the investigation and then the pressure-building leaks disclosing its existence came from?
Fear probably caused you to keep the Clinton-appointed leadership in place at the CIA long after some of its top operatives mounted a rebellion against the White House, in part to shift attention from their failures to yours. I know that George Tenet charmed you, and the rest of us. That's what spies and spymasters do, sir. You should have been taking that into account.
But you feared something else more. You feared openness. You feared laying out your fallibilities along with your strengths for others to judge. You feared laying out facts -- good, bad and indifferent -- for others to judge. You were unable even to acknowledge that the fiefdoms within your administration were at war.
Yes, that sounds like the reason. Bush is a paranoid control-freak who assuages his fears by surrounding himself with crony yes-men he believes he can control (even if some of them are in actual fact flipping his switches) - and in so doing builds for himself an alternative reality which bears little resemblance to the real world and simply isn't an environment that the most powerful dumbass on the planet needs in order to do a competent job. It explains everything, from the League of Extraordinarily Corrupt Gentlemen on the Hill all the way through to his inability to change course in Iraq. The man needs therapy. He certainly shouldn't be running a superpower.
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