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According to the Peter Principle as expounded by Laurence Peter, people rise in bureaucracies (public or private) until they hit their level of incompetence, at which point they cease to rise, so over time the higher rungs tend to become filled with incompetent people.
In the Bush administration, however, people tend to overshoot their levels of competence by several orders of magnitude. Take Shrub himself, for example. If he had ceased his upward trajectory when he hit his level of incompetence, he'd still be a drunken cheerleader at Yale. However, the rules are different for members of the privileged classes, just as they were in the British military of 3 centuries ago, where the higher ranks were filled with the moronic, inbred younger sons of the aristocracy.
Bush rose in the world for the same reason British Navy officers did in the 17th and 18th centuries: because of connections to the aristocracy. Bush was useful to the rangers not because of any personal competence, but because they could leverage his name in the process of eminent-domain takings of land on which to build their stadium. He was likewise useful to the oil industry because his presence guaranteed that countries like Dubai, who sought favor with his father, would shower all sorts of special concessions on any company that employed him in a figurehead role.
According to my analysis, Karl Rove's role in all this was to manage Bush's public image so as to maintain him as a viable figurehead. He does this by manipulating the complicit mass media with the same bag of dirty tricks that his mentor, Lee Atwater, developed and used for Reagan and Bush 1. The media are willing distributors for Rove's venomous messages. Rove succeeds with his brazen lies and distortions because the blaring and thoroughly corrupt media permit him to saturate the public consciousness with them, permitting no meaningful expression of any alternative messages. Thus even today, when all sorts of revelations are coming forward about the US Attorney scandal, the Plame affair, the coverup of global warming data, etc., the public is not yet in the streets with pitchforks.
It is not possible to keep up the Big Lie method forever in politics. The Russians knew they were being lied to, and developed afinely tuned ability to read between the lines of Pravda and Trud. They observed changes in the political winds by studying pictures of the big shots on the reviewing platform at the May Day parades to see who was standing nearest to whom. They smuggled messages and ran off samizdat publications on illicit mimeograph machines. They knew.
The Russians never had the Internet, never had a DU. We do, despite budding attempts to control it. We have a few publications like the Nation and the Progressive, and once in a while the bigger newspapers have a fleeting attack of conscience that flashes across the editorial page. And of course there are CSPAN and FSTV. There are Air America and Amy Goodman. One way or another, the truth gets around.
At this point the majority of people oppose the war. They want single-payer health care. B a huge majority they want the Congressional investigations to go on. By these and other signs a new truth is coming to light, and it is this:
Rove, too, has overshot his level of competence. And it will cost him his head.
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