The Poor Man Institute » The competence dodge

i agree with some, if not all, of what is said there. i'll also point out that you need to read about three banal posts just to get at the heart of the thing, and in truth, you'd be wasting your time. read the poorman, read my comment, and move on. life is short and the sun is shining.

i'll highlight my comment, because i'm good like that:

# Robert Green Says:
August 31st, 2006 at 12:34 am

i cannot emphasize enough, in any combination of bold, italic, or blockquote, how right kiche is in #5. just as the editors points out that beinart noticably leaves people like himself out of the equation (a point bob somerby has been making, between insane rants about nothing, for years on the daily howler) when discussing something in which he was inextricably linked, so too does anyone discussing iraq II need to pretend that the actual people who were actually going to execute the actual policy were…someone else. it was as if cheney, rumsfeld, bush (to a lesser extent in this case), feith, perle, wolfowitz et al had just been born in 2001. as if none of them had ever done anything before, not written papers, not…sold weapons to sadaam, not engaged in insane PNACkery, not been wrong going back to their specious bullshit about the soviets in the 70s (and before that, remember colin powell, who really bears more responsibility for iraq II than any human on this earth, was the guy who covered up my lai). these tabulae rasae were there for beinart et al to project their own ideas on, as if the execution would not be effected by the executioners.

there’s a whole separate question about competence–what i’m talking about above is what happens when you say: “i need to protect myself. i don’t know how to use this gun, and the bad guys are coming. i’m going to hand this gun to the completely fucking crazy person standing in the room with me, the one who has both shot his own friends and himself on numerous occasions. now i will feel safe.”

see, the bad guys may really be coming, and your assessment of what to do (get a gun into the hands of the right people to protect you) may be right as well. but if you can’t recognize past patterns of behavior as being just as important to weigh in your decision of ultimately what to do about your problem,

YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT.