Piss-Poor Management

Atiros has a post up about how President Pissypants, who is pissed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic administration in his new book, "State of Denial."

In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.

"He's ticked off big-time," said a well-informed source, "even if what they said was the truth."

Let's set aside for a moment the irony of a junta that leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent in order to punish her husband for daring to disagree with them getting their panties in a wad over -- well -- leaking. I think this incident provides a great deal of insight into a deeper problem with the Bush junta than their mere immunity to irony.

We've heard over and over that Bush surrounds himself only with yes-men and yes-women, with people who tell him only what he wants to hear. That's a deadly management strategy. No matter how much these clowns wish that they could create reality, they can't. Reality, that unforgiving Bitch Queen, will always out in the end. A manager who won't let his own people tell him when he's wrong is none the less wrong. He's simply destined to learn that he's wrong through, well, often through leaks. What your subordinate can't tell you to your face, s/he can leak to a reporter who will make sure that you read that you are wrong in the morning paper. That's what's going on here and that's what we see going on with increasing frequency.

Consider how the Baker Commission is now leaking like a sieve, even though the Bush consigliere (and I don't mean Mr. Botts) insists that it won't make a report until after the elections. Jimmy's talking to the press, warning Bush that the intervention is coming, because, apparently, he can't pick up the freaking phone and talk mano-a-mano with the man whose (s)election he ensured. Consider how career military men and life-long Republicans have to talk to Democratic committees in order to get in front of the cameras and say that it's past time for Rumsfeld to be sent off to cheat at squash at the old folks' home and as far away from the Pentagon as it's possible for him to be sent. Consider how neither Denny Hastert nor anyone else on the Hill even considered for a moment warning Bush that he had a rove Congressman, about to screw his one remaining constituency, the batshit crazy God-Hates-Fags fundies. Most managers, except for the completely insecure ones, would rather get bad news from their own people and in private rather than read about it in the news.

But his inability to hear bad news isn't Bush's only managerial flaw. Closely related to this flaw is his inability to ever admit that he's not omnipotent, that a course correction might be needed. He just can't do it. I guess it brings up traumatic memories of an over-martinied Barbara Bush whacking him with a belt and making him say over and over, "I was wrong; I was wrong; I was wrong." And, you know, if you're never going to admit that those tax cuts were a mistake, that Rumsfeld needs to go, that the planet really is dying from greenhouse gases, why should some underling risk his/her career by giving you news you don't want to hear? Instead, Bush just heads out and keeps catapulting the propaganda: Saddam was involved in the attacks of September 11th, we're safer now than we were before, there's no such thing as global climate change, abstinence education works, anyone who gives me bad news hates me, etc., etc.

It would be funny, if this now-enraged dingbat didn't have his finger on the nuclear button.

Thanks, Sandra Day!