MindSpinner

Today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about yet one more less than sage appointment within the Bush administration, Porter Goss’s choice of Kyle Foggo for the CIA’s # 3 position: executive director.

Friedman frames the larger issue:

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack?
No. In his excellent book on the Iraq war, “The Assassins’ Gate,” George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department’s best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion — when they were needed most — because that didn’t pass Dick Cheney’s or Don Rumsfeld’s ideology tests. And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise. When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust….

I understand that loyalty is important, but what good is it to have loyal crew members when the ship is sinking? So they can sing your praises on the way down to the ocean floor? I just don’t understand how a president whose whole legacy depends on getting national security and intelligence right would have tolerated anything but the very best in those areas. What in the world was he thinking?

Friedman leaves us to our answers: whatever thinking George Bush does, it is hardly perspicacious, and it serves ends other than our collective good.

I am interested in another journalistic investigation of some scope, however - the flip side of irresponsible appointments, mentioned above. I’ve heard much about Bush’s appointees, remarkable only for their lack of stellar qualifications, but I’ve read less than I want to know about the talent and expertise we are losing, often permanently, from the service of our country because the Bush crew is in charge. There are people we’ve depended on for years in many capacities, and, if they aren’t pushed out, some number of them are leaving in disgust and disillusionment.

I’m hoping Americans will effect a coup at the ballot box this year and again in 2008, but I’m quietly thinking that when we do - and we had better - we’ll be starting over with an infrastructure depleted of some of its best minds, the ones most likely to speak truth to power and count that the greatest loyalty they can offer. There will be rebuilding to do; a great storm has come through, a flood of foolishness; when it recedes it will leave its damage, its debris, its dead.