Decision Points: Insight into Mismanagement
Decision Points, the recently published memoir of President Bush, shows the former chief executive to be an admirable man driven by conviction, not polls. The false caricature of him as an evil idiot willing to lie so young soldiers can die for his war profiteer buddies is blown away. At the very least, readers will come away with an appreciation for the very tough decisions he had to make.
But at the same time, a trend of mismanagement in the Bush administration is seen, whether it is because of incompetence or the impossibility of trying to steer a ship the size of the federal government.
Bush’s repeated use of the word “blindsided” shows there was a major problem with the dissemination of important information. In one case, the acting attorney general, director of the FBI, and other Justice Department officials all said they would resign from their positions if President Bush extended the Terrorism Surveillance Program without their recommended improvements. Bush did not even know about the opposition until one day before the expiration date. He reacted by implementing the suggested changes, avoiding a political crisis at the last minute.
The same word is used to describe the Abu Ghraib scandal. Bush was informed of the scandal but did not know how vile the photos were until they hit the press. And nothing is said in the book about a major effort to figure out what went wrong. It appears that a major communications problem existed in the Pentagon. Bush says that in 2006, he noticed that a disparity existed between the generals running the Iraq War and the generals implementing it on the ground, with the latter saying more soldiers were necessary. Where along the pipeline was their information blocked from reaching President Bush?
An interesting story is also told about the sharp infighting that, as best detailed in Kenneth R. Timmerman’s Shadow Warriors, severely undermined the policies of the Bush administration. Bush admits that the State Department never fully supported his agenda, and says that he intervened to order Powell and Rumsfeld to fix the unhealthy divisions. “I instructed Condi’s skillful deputy, Steve Hadley, to tell the seconds and thirds to cool it. Nothing worked,” Bush said, referring to the officials below them whose “creative tension had turned destructive.” It seems as if Bush accepted this as an unavoidable reality.
In 2006, President Bush writes that Clay Johnson told him that other officials had begun using a word that “started with ‘cluster’ and ended with four more letters” to describe the White House’s structure of authority. Johnson drew him an organizational chart. “It was a tangled mess, with lines of authority crossing and blurred,” he writes. Here again we see a massive problem with bureaucracy hindering the ability of the government to move efficiently and quickly in support of its objectives.
What went wrong? We elected (the second) Bush, that’s what went wrong. We’ve and are experiencing the “mistakes” Mr. Bush made, why’d we read his excuses for those “miscommunications” and “mismanagement?”
Your words:
“Where along the pipeline was their information blocked from reaching President Bush?”
sum up the problem?
The real Government of America had an agenda that was not what George W was implementing and so he was “blindsided”.
My question then is: What is the real Government of America actually trying to achieve?
Defeat?
If so, why?
Decision Points, the recently published memoir of President Bush, shows the former chief executive to be an admirable man driven by conviction, not polls. The false caricature of him as an evil idiot willing to lie so young soldiers can die for his war profiteer buddies is blown away.
No.
Tokyo Rove was one of President Bush’s advisors. That explains the failures.
purposeful “mis”communication.. Everybody wanted to run things their way.. I think George was not served well.
and Barbara should shut her mouth up and stay home with George.
“Tokyo Rove’s” a keeper! Gonna borrow that one, for sure!
Although Tokyo Rove, as bad as he was/is, was/is only half the problem. (IE of the abject failure of Mr Bush’s second term and his administration’s morphing into one only barely distinguishable from a “Democratic” National Socialist Workers’ and Gangsters’ Fascist Party “administration. That problem)
The real problem for any Republican administration is the every key permanent position in every one of the feral gummint’s department, agency, secretariat, office and/or bureau is in the iron-fisted grip of a “Democratic” National Socialist Workers’ and Gangsters’ Fascist Party activist.
As was most overtly displayed by their turning our mighty Military’s successful Iraq Liberation into the kind of “cluster” and a four letter word Mr Bush alluded to in his book, this is nowhere more true than among Foggy Bottom’s since the 1930s self-anointing, self-appointing, self-perpetuating and systemically Socialist International supporting basta*d offspring of the Soviet agents, Alger Hiss et al-descended brahmanas. And among that gang’s carefully cloned Foreign(er) Service(ing) savants.
If ditziness and cluelessness were virtues, Judy, you would be a saint.
Tell me, Judy, why do I suspect that the only reason why you made snotty comments about Karl Rove was because he thought that Christine O’Donnell was a lousey candidate?
C’mon, fess up, that was it, wasn’t it? Still in denial, are you, that, compared to Christine O’Donnell, Alvin Greene was brilliant and Charlie Rangel is honest and ethical and Cynthia McKinney would have been a more viable Republican candidate? (Do you even know who Alvin, Charlie and Cynthia are?)
Why do I suspect, also, that you have a history of being a poor judge of character and of exercising bad judgment and of making the wrong choices, and gee whiz, why do I suspect, too, that you think that Sarah Palin would make a terrific POTUS?
The description of the organizational chart reminds me of why Germany really lost in WWII. There were all these overlapping areas of authority and more every year created as a way to “solve” problems. Germany, thus, never reached its potential throughout the war.
Political creatures seek political power. They have these turf wars. People who do not understand these things intervene to “resolve” these petty conflicts, and it always ends up with some realignment, creating an ever-more-jumbled organizational mess, because these cretins are indulged. The proper answer is to fire both sides of the dispute, until they stop doing this. Good executives are liberal with the axe.
Conservatives make good Presidents and Governors, because they loathe monstrous government. They prefer government small, streamlined… and clear organizational charts.
Overarching guidelines work well. This group has this authority over this area. Period. Overlapping? This group has superior claim to this other group. Period. It will sometimes lead to some bad results, but the myriad problems it prevents is worth the few failures. Most importantly, it determines that the Boss is in charge and no one else. Petty B.S. will not be tolerated. Period.
Bush should have merged or eliminated many of the Departments, Bureaus, etc…. He should have just removed half the 5,000 or so Generals/Admirals. Then he wouldn’t be getting info and nonsense at the last minute. He wouldn’t get blindsided. When there are all these layers, and the petty have free rein, information gets filtered and blocked, only released at the last possible moment, so they can still claim they delivered it.
Purge. Such a pretty word, doncha think?
Not to worry, Obama will set the record straight when he writes his own memoirs; “Babbling Points” “How George Bush made me into a half-term President.
Half term? No, that would be cowardly, selfish, greedy and morally bankrupt.Nobody with a shred of self respect or respect for their constituency would pull such a weasily trick.
Okay..
Change it to, “I Are The One (Half Wit) We Waited For!”
There you go again, nitpicking with Sarah Palin. That one didn’t go over MY head.
Now why would you think of Sarah Palin? Was it the selfish part? The morally bankrupt part? The greedy part? The lack of self respect?
Well, those, and her belief that she is just so darned cutesy. She has the mind of a child.
So, what is the difference between Bush’s administration and every one that preceded him and the one that followed? From the top down, when you take time to look at an overall organizational chart for any major government entity, it is an accurate representation of a typical, disassociated big government bureaucracy. The right hand has no idea of what the left is doing and vice-versa. At least Bush was honest enough to admit it in print, not avoid it.
No president will ever have the control we imagine in our flights of fancy about how government is actually run at the street level, especially the federal government. You have a mixture of leftovers from each preceding administration and at the same time, career government employess with no particular political affiliation who will protect their territory from any intrusion from the outside, especially interlopers who come along every four years who may upset the apple cart.
Flowcharts and organizational charts are fine until one realizes that they are just charts and the only way they will ever work as designed is if they are executed by a computer program that has been successfully debugged and has no personal stake in the matter at hand.
During my early years in what was called “data processing”, now IT, it was my responsibility to develop flow charts and organizational charts for new systems and programs along with operational manuals to correspond with the data flow so everything was incorporated into a sensible and workable system. In every instance when we would get to the end and think we had the system working as expected, the human element always entered into the picture by way of a department manager, supervisor, floor leader, or a few employees who thought it was best to do it their way without consulting anyone to understand the impact of their actions.
Quite frankly, I am surprised any president can get anything done once it goes past his or her level. They really do not have the control we imagine.
You are so right. In fact I remember when Bill Clinton left office one of the last things he did (besides steal the furniture and pardon sixties radicals) was to make many of his political appointees in the State Department permanent. Meaning slots that were supposed to be filled by the next President and to serve at his pleasure were suddenly filled by Clinton cronies as permanent positions. We also see now that Colin Powell was a shill for the opposition and used ‘affirmative action’ to fill any and all slots he had left in the State Department. Add to that practically no ‘transition time’ after the election and 9-11 nine months in to his term and you begin to understand why there was a lot lacking in the management end of office of the President.
The next Republican president needs to clean house down to the basement. (Kind of like the Clinton’s cleaning out the travel office and firing all the U.S. Attorneys General across the land)
I wouldn’t call it mismanagment, so much as I would call it, the nature of bureaucracy. And this is what the left wants to do to American healthcare.
A rift was created and Congress tried to cut off funding for the war unless a firm timetable for withdrawal was established. This happened because the majority of the American people had turned against the war…
That was the Congress which had overwhelmingly voted for the war. That’s why we were there. But it only took the MSM branch of the Democrat party about three years of viciously biased ‘news’ to shove public opinion into opposition, and the Democrat opportunists then cashed in by selling out the military they’d voted to commit, and howling their new-found opposition.
The MSM then continued happily with its negative campaign against Bush, and after six years of it, succeeded in installing the most anti-American President and Congress ever elected.
Interesting that it only took two years for Americans to figure out what a lousy deal that was, despite continuous MSM cheerleading for the regime.
the bushes are what happen when you toss aside the principles of conservatism for political expediency
they have yet to understand that the left will always hate you even when, in principle, you are much closer to them than the right
catering to libs doesnt make them like you more-it only dissolves your credibility
“w” was a decent leader in a crisis and i honestly believe he loves the country and wanted the best for it
one of his faults was letting the msm dictate the monologue
and most of his idiotic domestic policies didnt help either
one of his faults was letting the msm dictate the monologue
You have totally nailed it.
How appropriate: You ditzy critics of Bush are also ditzy Palin supporters. Who’d a thunk it?
Boy, Palin sure has the lefty trolls worried, doesn’t she?
Rule #1: Whenever someone makes you look and feel stupid, shallow, obtuse, dense, sleazy, inadequate, uneducated and uninformed on the issues, demonize him by calling him a troll. Yeah, that’ll work.
BTW, jackass, since I’m not a troll or a Democrat, I wouldn’t know the answer to your assinine question. But I doubt that that ditz, Palin, has the Democrats worried. I’m more inclined to suspect that they hope (and pray) that fools like you will get her nominated to run against Obama, because she will be the one and ONLY candidate who won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Only fools like you will vote for that jackass.
And you think changing your name every post and calling me names will convince anyone except the sock on your hand?
By the way, I am most assuredly not a supporter of Palin for POTUS, as you can see here and here, among other posts.
See, that’s the big difference between me and you. I have a long and searchable track record of what I say. You, on the other hand, change your name every time you turn around in order to give yourself plausible deniability.
Go back to HuffPo for more training.
and when the nub gets a little upset the tourette’s of jackass and typos of asinine flood the necro’d posts
I’m sure that your comments make perfect sense to you.
But they won’t make any sense to any rational person.
Thanks for the book review and perspective on what President Bush wrote. It was clear ( to me ) from the beginning that there were substantial parts of the Federal Government that went out of their way to thwart this President at every turn. He had to swim against the current and won a second term despite the tricks and double-crossing.
He was hated because he won a close election. He was not as conservative as I’d liked, but then again, a conservative that I’d liked couldn’t have been elected. Hopefully soon though. I think history will judge President Bush well… he was up against a massive propaganda war at home against him and infighting and rebellion within DOD and State.
Read “Saddam’s Secrets” by his general Georges Sada to learn what,
even now, Bush doesn’t know, that tons od sarin was smuggled into Syria
while American forces gathered. WMD.
Duelfer Commision also
predicted that with what they found,
Saddam would have had an A bomb
and given it to alQaeda by 2008.
Thank you, President Bush
We have an out of control government managed by bureaucrats who favor their own interests above the nation’s and are not the least bit concerned the president’s agenda, certainly not Bush’s. The military has the UCMJ with its threat of summary execution should you try to quit your job. Compare this to the State Department, which is run by socialists pulling down six-figure salaries who will out last any president, and the CIA, a bunch of stooges too busy writing books critical of the administration to actually predict the disintegration of the Soviet Union or the rise of radical Islam.
The last I looked we were winning in Iraq, or at least Obama was trying to take credit for the success of the war, yet Bush is guilty of “mismanagement”? If we applied the same scrutiny of FDR’s many blunders during WWII and throughout the Great Depression, he’d be hung in effigy rather than sanctified.
So; Applying the ‘truths’ in this book to the incompetent, petulant, juvenile we now have in the White House, it is easy to see why he is so clueless about, just about everything. They put anything in front of him and tell him they want his autograph, and he signs it; Naturally without reading any part of it.
A huge message I get from excerpts from this book is that, Obama doesn’t have near the street sense, or intelligence needed for this job.
He has no clue of how to HELP OR AID ANYTHING. He’s been schooled as a subversive, and he’ll never find out how to be any kind of leader for anyone.
And you do have a clue???? I think not.
YEA! I got the game for my birthday!
Ah, I see that senseiless has changed her name, her way, presumably, of licking her wounds from being put in her place on another thread. That name, Jack, is just so, so, well, so butch. LOL
Nope. Wasn’t me. Guess you got fooled after all, eh?
I am hoping the same best work from you in the future.
I missed the part about trying to pimp out the US to Mexico, and the new world order,when he was`serving as Vicente Fox’s errand boy.This fratboy lickspittle for globalism should just shut his gob and give his Palin-hating mother a break from ghostwriting his worthless memoirs.