Stupidest Reporter Alive

Elizabeth Bumiller has been covering the Bush White House for sixty-three months, and only now does she tell us that until now, within the Bush White House, it has been considered uncool, a bit rude and hostile, to be "overtly demanding... [to] challenge you on a lot of things... to see if there are any holes in the argument..."

Isn't this type of thing the thing that a real reporter covering the Bush White House would have reported in Month One, not in Month Sixty-Three?

Todd Gitlin comments:

Sorry To Have Left Out the Logic, But We're Improving | TPMCafe: In this morning's NYT piece by Elisabeth Bumiller, who seems to be stirring to life now that Bush is bobbing along in the 30-plus-percent approval range, there's interesting confirmation of just how idiotically the White House has conducted itself for five-plus awful years. "Mr. Bolten has a sharper management style than Mr. Card," Ms. Bumiller writes. "'Josh is a little more overtly demanding,' said one former member of the administration who was granted anonymity so that he could stay on good terms with White House aides. 'He's immediately playing the devil's advocate, and he'll challenge you on a lot of things, mostly to make sure it was well thought through and to see if there are any holes in the argument.'"

I read it this way: Paul O'Neill (as channeled by Ron Suskind in The Price of Loyalty) was right to have been shocked when he went to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury and discovered that Bush and the inner circle were not interested in memos arguing contrary opinions--a practice O'Neill had observed in both the Nixon and Ford administrations. There was no devil's advocacy, not even any half-logical angel's advocacy.

Bush, flying on a gut and a prayer, knew what he wanted. His chief of staff didn't care whether arguments were "well thought through" or whether there were "any holes" in them. The hell with logic, the hell with evidence. And his chief of staff didn't care because the Decider-in-Chief didn't care.

But never mind: Bush will now be "a little more overtly" well-advised.

Now, after 63 months of the steady catastrophe of the Bush years, it can be told.