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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (39157)	4/12/2004 7:24:54 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

evidence Dick Clarke's book and testimony One of the problems, I think, is that too many folks don't distinguish between fact finding and blame. Clarke had plenty to say that was informative. It could be framed as blaming. Or it could be framed as explanatory. Some people take it one way and others take it the other way depending on their temperaments and their stakes in the matter. For example, he talked about how the new administration wanted to do things its own way and excluded/didn't trust the holdovers. That really resonated with me. I can speak from personal experience that this is SOP. All new administrations tend to squander the first year because they seal themselves up and don't access the holdovers and civil servants who could help them crank things up. I had lunch last week with a very old friend I hadn't seen in years who just retired as CIO of a Federal agency. That's what we talked about, not in the context of Clarke but in the context of inefficiency and waste and frustration. You were complaining about government inefficiency the other day. Well that's inefficiency plus. But it happens with every administration, it happened with this one, and it's possible that it it hadn't happened in this particular case things might have turned out differently on 9/11, or not. There is a lesson in this. That lesson is that holdovers and civil servants are not the enemy--al Qaeda is the enemy. It's a mistake that all new administrations make. But we won't learn that lesson because people look at Clarke's comments about exclusion as causing a personal vendetta, as blaming Bush. It's too bad we can't just interpret information as explanation and not blame.