I watched a 9/11 documentary yesterday that focused on the Bush administration. It was mostly personal remembrances of the hours and days following the attacks, with Bush, Cheney, Condelezza Rice, Karl Rove and many other administration officials speaking on both personal and professional topics.
As I watched, I grew angrier and more disgusted by the combination of hubris and elitism of most of the participants in the administrations response to a huge national security failure. Several things stood out…
The first and perhaps most disappointing was President Bush’s curious inability to express himself. I am old enough to understand the difference between glibness and intelligence, and the inability to craft a marvelous turn of a phrase or speak elegantly is not a sign of stupidity or ignorance. One can communicate powerful ideas with simple words, but he couldn’t even do that. I think that speaks to how limited his imagination and vision is, and current events certainly back that up, as his comments yesterday expose. He chose the lazy route of condemning domestic terrorism! How clever…how visionary!
But the most disturbing was the careful and almost universal support for their own failures! 20 years later they could have looked back and questioned their choices and decisions, yet the only criticism was the formulaic, “We should have done more.”
No, you should have done less. Much less. And what you did do was the wrong thing, both before and after the attacks. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and clearly these people have not spent any time reevaluating the profound decisions they made in light of the conspicuous lack of results. Their attitudes were redolent of a corporate team-building exercise, in which everyone is wonderful and intelligent and the entire focus should be on supporting the team and its decisions.
Except…3,000 people died, and their response was to spend trillions of dollars and many more thousands of lives on nation building and creating nonsensical and unworkable alliances. And when that didn’t work, well…spend more money!
The popular definition of insanity is “Doing the same thing day after day and expecting a different result.” But these people aren’t insane, they are simply stupid and ignorant and arrogant. That they didn’t observe the results of their plans and correct accordingly is a sign of many things, but intelligence isn’t one of them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was correct, but the larger issue is that after three generations of our Ivy League elite making catastrophically wrong decisions and creating a massive and uncontrollable Deep StateTM, coupled with a gleeful embrace of the Socialism-Lite of the Democrat party, we have come to the end of the road; those three generations of idiots has been enough to destroy American Exceptionalism and drag our great country into the muck of the rest of the world.
