"The dog that did not bark"

Dr. Kay has finally raised publicly what many others outside of the administration have wondered, just how poorly has Condaleeza Rice done her job as head of the NSC?

A former Bush administration official who led the fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was "the dog that did not bark" over Iraq's weapons program.

In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "hanging out in the wind" when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq's weapons programs.

"Where was the N.S.C?" Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information.

Ouch.

I think this goes to the heart of what Dahlia Lithwick writes today in the Times. We have to stop infantalizing GW Bush and arguing that he's a fool who needs to be kicked out of office. It's not that simple and turns the race into one of personality. The issue isn't simply Bush, some foolish man-child holding the levers of power. It's the so-called adults he has working for him. He relies on, and has been unbelievably loyal to, a crew of vain, self-important, and myopic bureaucrats who have formulated failed policies, while failing to develop any workable strategies for the middle east, terrorist threats, the economy, the environment...you name it.