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Wellllll… if that “traitorous liar” part happens with Tenet, I’ll be both surprised and apologetic (to you). Neither Tenet nor Powell has been accurately characterized as a Bush enemy, and I honestly don’t think they will. Disagreements? Aplenty. Animus? Not so far.

O’Neill and Clarke both had self-inflicted warts, and used their newfound freedom, word processors, and ghost writers to try to apply Compound-W (remember that stuff?).

The reaction from the Bush administration to each was, I thought, measured. Just because someone’s trash talking you doesn’t mean you have to lay back and take it, does it?

Hmm. It sounds as if you think I’ve somehow “turned” on Tenet, but I’ve never been very impressed with him, and have repeatedly wondered why Bush didn’t fire him long before now.

As for the others, well, O’Neill was the butt of jokes in Washington until he got Strange New Respect by coming out against Bush, and Clarke was, in fact, another holdover who didn’t exactly cover himself with glory.

Which is not putting it nearly as well as Patton, above, with his “Compound W” line. . . .

Patton: “if that ‘traitorous liar’ part happens with Tenet, I’ll be both surprised and apologetic (to you). Neither Tenet nor Powell has been accurately characterized as a Bush enemy”

Within mere minutes of the announcement, Kathy Lopez was saying, “I can picture it all now. The Tenet press conference with Howard Dean’s group and MoveOn were he announces that Bush is a failed leader. The October surprise book where he blames everything wrong with intel on W., Condi & the Pentagon.”

Some people were laying the foundation for “traitorous liar” nearly instantly with such hyperbole.

And as for Tenet and Powell not being “accurately” described as a Bush enemy, you are right, but they’ve gotten trashed nonetheless : “The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation. There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard). First, it’s not Rumsfeld’s occupation; it’s Colin Powell’s and George Tenet’s. Second, although it’s painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, it’s simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it.”

The above is hardly accurate. But there’s a lot of it out there anyway.

Glenn: “O’Neill was the butt of jokes in Washington until he got Strange New Respect by coming out against Bush, and Clarke was, in fact, another holdover who didn’t exactly cover himself with glory.”

Glenn, I’m not saying you “turned” on Tenet. In fact, I didn’t directly reference anything but your three words and link, used as a jumping off point. And you call them “holdovers” as if they were involuntarily foisted on the Bush administration, but my point is that with each and every one of them, a conscious decision was made to keep them in their position. Someone hired these guys. And in each case, no one fired them (i.e., public punishment), they resigned.

Back when I was program director, I once made a comment to my Dad (VP of Operations at that time) that I was surrounded by turkeys. He pointedly asked, “and how did that happen?”

Blame Rumsfeld. Blame Powell. Blame Tenet. It’s popular sport. And it ignores who hired them, who is supposed to oversee them, and who is ultimately responsible for their actions.

Yet they are mostly talked about as if they are free agents who just appeared on the field, and sometimes are screwing up Our Good President’s plans, dang them!

I’m just trying to remind folks who’s responsible for these people having the jobs we claim they’ve screwed up.

Well, yes. Bush is responsible for people he hires, or keeps on, in the same way as every President. Which is why I think it was a mistake to keep Tenet on.

Powell, I think, serves his role in the Administration quite well, and you don’t see me trashing him much. (And my ideal Secretary of State, if such a person exists, wouldn’t be able to function in the State Department as it exists today anyway.) I haven’t been piling on Rumsfeld, either. I don’t know whether he’s right, but I don’t know enough to say that he’s wrong. He’s clearly Bush’s guy in a way that Tenet never was.

But maybe it’s not really my comments you’re responding to here?

From Noel Coward’s never produced play “Post Mortem”:

JOHN: I do wish you’d shut up, Perry. There’s no sense in working yourself up into rages.

PERRY: I’m sorry. It gets in my mind and I can’t get it out—all that mealy mouthed cant being shoved down the people’s throats!

JOHN: The demand creates the supply, I think. The civilian public must enjoy its war; and it also has to reconcile it with a strong sense of patriotism and a nice Christian God. It couldn’t do that if it had the remotest suspicion of what really happens.

PERRY: Do you think it will ever know?

JOHN: I hope so, later on, much later, when it’s all over.

PERRY (violently): Never, never, never! They’ll never know whichever way it goes, victory or defeat. They’ll smarm it all over with memorials and Rolls of Honour and Angels of Mons and it’ll look so noble and glorious in retrospect that they’ll all start itching for another war, egged on by dear old gentlemen in clubs who wish they were twenty years younger, and newspaper owners and oily financiers, and the splendid women of England happy and proud to give their sons and husbands and lovers, and even their photographs. You see, there’ll be an outbreak of war literature in so many years, everyone will write war books and war plays and everyone will read them and see them and be vicariously thrilled by them, until one day someone will go too far and say something that’s really true and be flung into prison for blasphemy, immorality, lese majesty, unnatural vice, contempt of court, and atheism, then there’ll be a glorious religious revival and we’ll all be rushed across the Atlantic to conquer America, comfortably upheld by Jesus and the Right!

That was written more than 70 years ago, and it might have been written yesterday—or today.