[Dialogue] The Wages of Hubris

[David & Ellen Rebstock]

Cynthia

Your list of Hubris and arrogance instances is much to short.  
The style is in every speech, press conference, visit in other countries, response to Congress, etc from Bush, Chaney et al.  I believe the number 1 criteria for the next Pres is someone with a great deal of humility, ability to listen and communicate effectively and surround himself with many of the same.  After reading the Audacity to Hope I'm coming to the conclusion so far that Obama might well be that person.

Dave Rebstock
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: FacilitationFla at aol.com 
  To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Monday, May 07, 2007 11:00 AM
  Subject: [Dialogue] The Wages of Hubris


  May 2, 2007, 9:09 am 
  NYTimes
  Wolfowitz and the Wages of Hubris
  Tags: George Bush, Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank

  Paul Wolfowitz’s failures as a war architect and as a World Bank president flow from the same source, suggests Washington Post columnist David Ignatius: “The lesson of Wolfowitz’s failure is that you can’t change things unless you truly understand them. That was true in Iraq, and it was true at the World Bank.” 

  Ignatius calls Wolfowitz “an idealist who understood everything, except his own limitations.” He adds, “When Wolfowitz decamped to the World Bank in 2005, he took with him two abiding characteristics of the neoconservatives — a passion for transformation and a disdain for lesser beings wedded to the status quo.”

  The fatal flaws of Wolfowitz and of the Bush administration are one and the same, Ignatius says. He writes:

    Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding advice to work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he installed a palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky “we know best” confidence of the Bush administration.

    This disdain for career staff officers — whether at the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the Justice Department or an international agency such as the World Bank — is a defining characteristic of the Bush administration and a big reason for its undoing. Administration officials are arrogant — no other way to put it. They ignore the advice of the professionals, whom they regard as obstacles to their agenda of transformation. In their impetuous self-confidence, they become wreckers.

    This hubris recurs again and again. We saw it in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s high-handed management style, in Vice President Cheney’s continuous pressure on C.I.A. analysts to bolster the administration’s message on Iraq, in C.I.A. Director Porter Goss’s purge of agency officers suspected of disloyalty, in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s treatment of career attorneys at Justice


  Cynthia N. Vance
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