Medal of Freedom recipients -- profiles in accountability

Let's see here, we have a CIA director on whose watch we failed to "connect the dots" of the Sept. 11 plot, and who said that Iraq's possession of WMD was a "slam dunk;" a general who accepted the SecDef's mission knowing he didn't have enough troops to keep the peace in Iraq and who didn't issue orders to stop full-scale looting; and a director of the Coalition Provision Authority who ordered the Iraqi army disbanded and turned a marginal cleric into a leader of the Iraqi opposition by trying to silence him; in other words, the architects of what we now lovingly refer to as Mess-o-Potomia. These are the luminaries who received the Medal of Freedom yesterday.

But there is precedent here. After all, Johnson awarded the Medal of Freedom to McGeorge Bundy, so there is a history of the award being equated with SNAFU.