The Feithing

(image via Jesus’ General‘s Doug Feith parody site)

When compiling a list of the most loathsome douchebags involved in the Bush admin (I know, an endless task), b-lister Douglas Feith (along with David “I Keep Evil in My Beard” Addington) is often overlooked.  Monday Feith came crawling out of his dank little hole (currently located at Georgetown, where he teaches a course that’s sole purpose seems to be trying to scrub the massive shit stain off his reputation) to speak at the cretin-packed stink tank American Enterprise Institute. He was introduced by the deeply delusional and discredited Richard Perle while his massive failure of a buddy Paul Wolfowitz sat in the front row to cheer him on. No cameras were allowed at the event, but the Washington Post was there:

A former top Pentagon official blamed the Bush administration’s top official in Iraq for abandoning a plan for a quick transition to Iraqi leadership in the summer of 2003 and instead keeping the U.S. government in control of the country for more than a year.

The decision to carry out “a lengthy occupation was, I believe, the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq,” said Douglas J. Feith, who as undersecretary of defense for policy was a key figure in the drive to war.

[...]

Feith served as one of the top civilians in the Pentagon from July 2001 until August 2005. Many military officers disliked his precise, intellectual approach to making decisions, which they found tangled and time-consuming. Most famously, retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led the U.S. invasion force in Iraq, stated in his memoir that Feith had achieved the reputation within the military of being “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet.”

But Feith was consistently supported by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press called him “without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government” and “one of the really . . . intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy.”

Defenders of Feith constantly throw around the “intellectual” tag when referring to him, probably to soften the blow of that Franks quote which will, thankfully, follow Feith to his grave.  Is he an intellectual? Sure, maybe using the simplest definition of the word, he is an intellectual, but he’s also WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, which should count for something outside of the neocon clubhouse.  And after hearing him interviewed on NPR back in April, let’s just say, I came away thinking Franks was pretty spot-on in his, ahem, frank assessment.

Fortunately, the Post wasn’t the only paper to cover Feith’s speech, The New York Times let the uber-crotchety Maureen Dowd loose on the Feithdom:

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

[...]

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

“At the end of the day, here we are, and as of now there’s a reasonable chance that the country is going to remain united,” he said. Not quite the original boast of democracy cascading through the Middle East.

Read it all.

ADDED BONUS: The title of this post came from a very funny TBogg video game title.

Posted by Kevin K. on 12/12/07 at 01:44 PM • Permalink
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