Being the Bush regime means not just never saying "We wuz wrong" but always having had competent people pointing out that your head's up your butt

QUOTES OF THE DAY
as assembled by the Washington Post (click to enlarge)


In the famous cleaned-up version of Lyndon Johnson's, er, tribute, Gerald Ford couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. By implication, though, ol' Jerry could at least perform these functions separately.

Whereas the image forming of the livestock inhabiting the highest regions of the Bush regime, a latter-day Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, is a herd of critters--whether blinded by wacko ideology, a passion for pillage and profiteering, or outright mental defect--so bumblingly incompetent, you figure they must hire outside contractors to chew their gum for them.

Watching the regime unravel is a matter of perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. What we invariably learn is not just that the regimists were wrong about absolutely everything, from the largest matters to the smallest, but that at every step along the way there were sane, trustworthy people warning them, often in considerable detail, which has usually proved on the money.

Today's cautionary tale of ideologically bumbling ineptitude concerns the obsessive and critically dangerous reliance on private "security" firms, which turn out to be mostly crony-connected bands of high-paid characters playing cowboys-on-crack. You and I may not have known much Blackwater and their ilk until relatively recently, but it turns out--surprise!--that there were plenty of warnings available.

Chapter and verse come courtesy of Steve Fainaru in the report in today's Washington Post from which the above quotes were drawn:

The U.S. government disregarded numerous warnings over the past two years about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq, expanding their presence even after a series of shooting incidents showed that the firms were operating with little regulation or oversight, according to government officials, private security firms and documents.

The warnings were conveyed in letters and memorandums from defense and legal experts and in high-level discussions between U.S. and Iraqi officials. They reflected growing concern about the lack of control over the tens of thousands of private guards in Iraq, the largest private security force ever employed by the United States in wartime.

Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department took substantive action to regulate private security companies until Blackwater guards opened fire Sept. 16 at a Baghdad traffic circle, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and provoking protests over the role of security contractors in Iraq.