Stupidity Plus

Gen. Tommy Franks was off the mark when he called Douglas Feith the dumbest effing guy on the planet. On 60 Minutes tonight, Feith showed that stupidity alone is not enough to describe a clueless academic intoxicated by power and willing to stoop to intellectual dishonesty that would shame any used-car salesman

"What we did after 9/11," he told Steve Kroft, "was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack."

"So you're saying," an incredulous Kroft followed up by asking, "you didn't think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it--more important to go after people who weren't responsible for it?"

Feith, who helped cook the intelligence to justify the invasion, was pimping his doorstop book that blames everyone else, especially L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraq occupation for the first two years, for the ensuing fiasco.

If he had had his way, Feith claims, he would have turned the country over to con man Ahmad Chalabi, who fed him and his Neo-Con rubes $33 million of false information to lie us into the war.

Dumb isn't enough. Try shameless, arrogant and deceitful. There is at least one like him on most campuses. Just our luck that this specimen ended up in Rumsfeld's Defense Department.

"Dumbest Guy on the Planet" Explains It All

At a Neo-Con reunion last night, Don Rumsfeld's Three Stooges, who planned the war in Iraq, got together to blame the mess there on somebody else, L. Paul Bremer, who ran the occupation for the first two years.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told the faithful at the American Enterprise Institute that his plan was not "to be around for many, many months" but that Bremer overruled him, thereby putting the US in today's stalemate.

Feith, labeled by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet," was introduced by former colleague Richard Perle while Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank lover, sat up front and agreed that Feith was "pretty much on the mark."

After hearing about the talk, Bremer told a reporter that Feith's "argument isn't with me," that President Bush told him before leaving for Baghdad to "take our time setting up an interim administration."

In reviewing George Tenet's memoir for the Wall Street Journal, Feith accused the former CIA Director of making up stories about how we got into Iraq. With his own book due for publication is March, Feith is getting a head start on fabricating his own.

Raw Material About Bush

What were they expecting when the White House gave Robert Draper access to George W. Bush? A tame Bob Woodward? A Texas sycophant? A good old boy who would be influenced by the fact that the President’s father had been an honorary pallbearer at his grandfather’s funeral?

When Karen Hughes brought Draper in, the working title of his book was reassuringly positive, “The Consequential President,” not the mordant “Dead Certain” that has now been published with revelations about Bush’s attempt to blame L. Paul Bremer III for disbanding the Iraqi Army, his hope for progress there so his successor would have to “stay longer,” the First Lady’s distaste for Karl Rove and other embarrassments.

But in a White House obsessed by loyalty, it may have escaped them that Draper, although proposing to provide “raw material” for history, was an experienced journalist who might not reward access with flackery.

One sign of the Administration’s current disarray is the failure so far to get into gear to discredit Draper’s book. With Rove gone and Tony Snow on the way out, the passion to spin it all away is not what it used to be.