Don't look where you've fallen. Look where you slipped."
Old African Proverb
"If you keep slipping on banana peels, stop throwing them on the ground."
New American Proverb
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
The White House wants something so bad they can taste it.
Someone outside the White House says, "Trust me. This information is solid. A slam dunk so to speak."
Federal investigators whose job is to check out the validity of intelligence says that there are humongous red flags concerning this information.
The President and his allies CHOOSE to ignore anything but the positive reports. And if they do check out the negative reports, they just go to the people with the positive reports for an explanation. And when they announce that this is a go, it blows up in their face.
Hellooooooooooo, Bernie Kerick. President Bush's one-time choice choice to guard against allowing attacks by the bad guys and now a federal investigation into Kerick is coming back to bite Rudy Guiliani in the ar*e, just like it did Bush.
But why shouldn't the President have selected Kerik? He already knew the bad guys, accepting over a hundred thousand in apartment renovations from a New Jersey family with ties to the Mafia. Tony Soprano must have been laughing all the way to the Bada Bing with the Kerick nomination. .
Investigators also questioned Kerik's business deals, his record of mismanagement and connections to a corruption prosecution. But Rudy Guiliani, his business partner, says he's okay. Certainly complete partisanship there. I'm not saying Rudy is as unreliable as Curveball. But you don't just go to his present wife to ask if you can trust Rudy. Not when there are plenty of ex's who might be holding some different data.
Bernie Kerick. The guy vetted with all due vigilance and forethought that went into an invasion of Iraq.
One of the Right's favorite excuses for the mess in Iraq is that "mistakes happen in war." The problem (among so, so many) with this White House is that they keep making the SAME mistakes. They did with Iraq, they did with Michael Brown, they did it with Harriet Miers, they did it with Katrina, and they did it again with Kerik.
You must learn from your mistakes and failures or your apologies have the same credibility of an eight year old saying he won't forget to brush their teeth. To actually benefit from failure you must take an honest action to make sure it never happens again.
One way might be to have experts investigate your failures and apply what they've learned. I don't know, say like the 9/11 Committee. Or you could just vet intelligence from all your agencies, not just the ones that agree with you.
Not this White House. They know better. They say they've learned but then keep making the same mistakes. Real changes? Never. See? Words, not actions.
What this White House relies on doesn't live within a thousand miles of honest intent. They thrive on ignoring the sum of the information. Think this White House even wants to learn from their mistakes? Vice President Cheney still says Saddam had insidious ties with Al Quaeda.
That's not a search for learning. That's just plain ignorant. And an insult to all our intelligence.
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