I was remiss in not bringing Friday's column from Dan Froomkin to your attention. If there's one columnist inside the I-495 Beltway who seems to get it consistently right, it's the Washington Post's Froomkin. But yesterday, rather than offering a lot of his own snarky opinions, he compiled a laundry list of commentary on the recently released presidential commission report which detailed failures in the intelligence community leading up to the Iraq quagmire.
What's most maddening about the response to this report (and a host of other BushCo foibles) is that no one has been held to account for the failures, either in this instance or for the months leading up to Sept. 11th, 2001. I think Americans can accept mistakes - in fact, we're forgiving of errors to a fault, sometimes - particularly those of our leaders. Witness the clean personal slate that George Bush got the day that he was "born again".
But when the CEO of 'Murica, LLC can not admit a personal mistake; when he can not hold anyone personally responsible for so costly a snafu as botched pre-Iraq intel; when he promotes personnel (Condi) and gives Medals of Freedom (Bremer, Tenet) for gross incompetence; when he can flat out lie about these things and get a wink and a nod from a sycophantic press -- we've entered the realm of leadership sociopathy.
Perhaps at this point the personal (and legal) liability of George Bush is just too great to say, "hey, we fucked up". I tend to think it's more a case of megalomania and political insulation writ large. In other words, Bush's head is too full of himself to admit a mistake or say "the buck stops here", and his coterie steps lightly around the "no bad news" bubble that's been constructed around the the king.
It drives me nuts that even without him performing some act of contrition, most 'muricans have given George W. Bush a complete pass on the accountability issue. And I don't even mean his own accountability. I'm talking about the clear, documented evidence that department heads at the highest level of his administration have flat out screwed the pooch on everything from 9/11 and Iraq, to the current energy crisis and the continuing Social Security scam-a-thon.
I guess what I'm saying is that I need to see someone's head on a pike following a report such as was released this past Thursday, rather than elevating the protagonists to a pedestal.
I really need to hear someone say, "I'm sorry."
