First Door on the Left

I have been saying for years that George W. Bush has no business being where he is. He simply does not have the intelligence nor the leadership skills required of the highest office in the land. (Just for the record, I said the same back when he was the governor of Texas.) The author of this piece in the Washington Post appears to agree…

Management Style Shows Weaknesses

President Bush has long prided himself for focusing on big goals rather than niggling details and delegating significant responsibility to his aides. But his belated attention to the brutality at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison has revealed vulnerabilities in a management style that had brought him personal and political success.

(snip)

Outsiders, including some Republicans who speak forlornly about the debacle, said the Abu Ghraib scandal is the price Bush is paying for lacking curiosity and showing unwillingness to delve into potential roadblocks to his larger mission.

Paul C. Light, an authority on bureaucracy who is a political scientist at New York University, said Bush “should have been sharp enough to see the potential damage to the U.S. reputation, if not his own.” But Light said that with Bush’s approach to governing, an international group’s concerns about detainees would have been viewed as “nothing but a rounding error” in the greater goal of fighting global terrorism.

“This administration has been blinded by its hubris,” Light said. “The way this group of people operates is to have this kind of echo chamber in which they hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. . . . They have no formal or informal method for challenging themselves, and that is a perfect recipe for this kind of result.”

It is so nice to have my views vindicated!