Don’t Trust your safety – or anything else, for that matter – to a large bureaucracy.

That tenet* is brought to you courtesy of George Tenet, head of the CIA as 9/11 was brewing. I don’t blame Tenet personally for 9/11, any more than I blame Freeh, Clinton, Bush, Rice, Mitchell, etc etc.

I blame the stupidity and incompetence of virtually every large bureaucracy on the planet. Everywhere they are tested (schools, Katrina, DMV) they either fail in cost per unit of output, or they fail spectacularly.

Don’t believe me?
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Tenet’s 9/11 morning

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet had breakfast with former Sen. David Boren (D.-Oklahoma) at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. According to Bob Woodward’s account in “Bush at War,” Boren asked Tenet, “What are you worried about these days?”

Tenet had a two-word answer: Bin Laden.

Tenet told Boren that he feared Bin Laden was about to try something big, and that people underestimated “the capabilities and the reach” of what al-Qaida was “putting together.” What Tenet didn’t tell Boren, Woodward said, is that the CIA had intercepted a flurry of communications over the summer of 2001 suggesting that something “spectacular” was imminent.

As the two men talked, Tenet’s security guards approached their table and told Tenet that there was a “serious problem” — the World Trade Center had been attacked. Tenet called CIA headquarters. According to Woodward, he then turned to Boren and said: “This has bin Laden all over it.”

But before Tenet left the table, Woodward said he made one more comment — a reference to Zacarias Moussaoui — that suggested that the CIA Director’s prescience may have fallen short when it came to preventing the attacks. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”
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It isn’t that these are bad people, it’s that the world is beyond their grasp. Abolish the CIA, NSA, and place all the results (intelligence, pictures, phone conversations, etc.) from their “assets” into the public domain. We’ll figure it out much faster than any of them.

ten·et
n. An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization. See Synonyms at doctrine.

Polticians rarely win profiles in courage, but you’d think that with an unpopular war and other issues supposedly ‘breaking their way,” the Democrats would feel comfortable enough to show some courage.

With Obama already saying they’ll eventually capitulate on the forced timetable issue (making these recent votes mere jockeying), just what did the KOSanostrum and MooreOn.org get for their hard work. Here is yet another example…
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Democrats still silent on gun control

The Democrats, not officially beholden to the National Rifle Association, have been cowards more concerned about reelection in centrist districts than the trauma to American children. The same Reid who bemoans the loss of life over a failed Iraq war said about Virginia Tech, “I hope there’s not a rush to do anything. We need to take a deep breath.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored a question by a reporter on whether Virginia Tech would inspire Democrats to revisit gun control. All she said was, “the mood in Congress is one of mourning, sadness, and the inadequacy of our words or our actions to console the families and the children who were affected there.”

“Inadequacy of our words or our actions” was a Freudian slip. None of the home pages on the websites of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards says anything about guns in relation to Virginia Tech. This is despite the fact that the US public arsenal, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group based in Switzerland, “is comparable or even greater than the total firearms of all the armed forces in the entire world.”

This week, Massachusetts Representative Michael Capuano told the Globe “we know we’re going to lose” on any serious push for gun control because “the NRA has this place wrapped up.” With defeatism like that, who needs a Democratic majority?

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Well, at least we know the writer will empathize with Illinois Republicans.

Aside from that, the cowardice of our political class is surpassed only by their avarice for unwarranted perks & pensions (and the occasional self-enriching real estate deal.)

America needs a new class of politician on both sides of the aisle.