In the matter of Tenet vs. Feith: Is Georgetown U. running some sort of welfare program for has-been butt-kissing bureaucrats and hooligan ideologues?

"Tenet and Feith [right] are teaching rival versions of recent history and taking their disagreements public. Each is teaching a class that reflects his own worldview and experience in institutions--the Defense Department and the CIA--that saw the world in starkly different terms. "
--from the article "Teaching Recent History From Opposite Perspectives" in today's Washington Post

In her Post piece, Dafna Linzer offers us a glimpse at a pair of presumably graduate-level seminars recently completed by a pair of pustules currently disfiguring the butt of the Georgetown University faculty:

* former Director of Central Intelligence George "I'm Spinning As Fast As I Can" Tenet, who as head of the CIA perfected the transformation of intelligence gathering and analysis into a jolly game of "Just Tell Me What You Want"

* "Devil Dog" Dougie Feith, the man who--as under secretary of defense (no. 3 man in the Pentagon) and head of Dapper Donnie Rumsfeld's private Defense Department "alternative intelligence" factory--took whatever shards of information, movement-serving factoid, and sheer fantasy he could gather in his grubby mitts and hammered them into psychotic fabrications for use as jerk-off material in his Neocon Wet Dreams of World Domination

Oh, there are cute anecdotes about their either cordial or frosty relationship (depending who you listen to), and earnest interview tidbits with one of only two students admitted both to Tenet's seminar, which I imagine was called something like Advanced Bureaucratic Ass Tonguery 401, and to Feith's lie-o-rama, "If You Believe Your Megalomaniacal Delusions Hard Enough, It's Almost Like They're True."

And there is a sincere effort to describe the course matter (with complete reading lists) of the two "rival" courses. As reporter Linzer would have it, "The tale of the two professors is shaping up as a reproduction in miniature of the Bush administration's titanic struggle over Iraq."

And yet, and yet. Isn't there something surreal about a major university fobbing off not one but two such schmucks as people qualified to teach? Qualified, that is, to teach something other than how to bring about the seemingly permanent quagmirification of the U.S. in Iraq.

Take that snot-nose kid who took both classes. Let's say he's as skilled a brown-noser as his Post quotes suggest and comes away with "A"s in both. Does that put him at the top of the list of up-and-coming bureaucratic nonentities fit to lead us into our next foreign-policy debacle?