Eric points to King of Zembla which quotes a bit of an interview with James Fallows, who wrote the article “Bush’s Lost Year” I pointed to on Monday night.

This:
The “pro” clearly is eliminating Saddam Hussein. No one would dispute that that was a benefit. The question is whether, in the vast scheme of things, it was worth it, given the way it was done. That’s what historians will ask, and what Americans should be asking—at least in my view.

seems to fit right in the with the absolutely pitiful and decptive paraphrase of Kerry’s NYU speech by Bush (which ABC noticed as rather ridiculous as well). The quote above is exactly what Kerry was saying, and Bush reatced to Kerry with a similar cluelessness that is described in the second half of that quote above.

Fallows goes on:The result of all this is a kind of path of folly where the people who could say, “Wait a minute, is this a good idea?” were systematically excluded from the decisions, and a smaller and smaller group of people reassured each other on the basis of hope rather than evidence.

That fits the experience also of Colin Powell himself, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio, and Joseph Wilson. The decisions are “already made”, and the iodea of a “expert staff” is just window dressing. The same seems true of the wholw government apparatus. GOvernment agencies and regulatory offices are run not by devotees of those sciences, but by former lobbyists for the large entities in whose interest lies the relaxing of those standards.

Robert F. Kennedy says as much as well in his new book “Crimes Against Nature” about the way the Bush administration has replaced “environmental” scientists with those “experts” that the big money interests want to see there so they can gut the existing environmental protections, and which has been happening at an alarming pace, and got a great head start in Texas under W’s governorship.