Dementia? And Justice Scalia

[sofa king]

5. And "indolent," too.

Remember that the biggest lesson we learned from the Bush Administration is that unvarnished evil is also highly incompetent. Dick Cheney would not be a citizen of Dubai today if he hadn't fucked up three dozen different ways while getting paid under the table by KBR. He has to be an Arab because, at any time, he could wind up an American felon. Because he was lazy.

Bush and Cheney's policies could have easily destroyed the United States, were it not for the fact that both of them are lazy old-boy insiders, who have "people to do those things" who are also lazy old-boy insiders, and so on.

They weren't even particularly good at pursuing their own criminal activities--the WMDs were never found because they couldn't sneak them in past all the spies who were watching them once they knocked Iraq over. Eventually, they wound up pointing the finger at the very weapons that Donald Rumsfeld sold to Saddam Hussein. That's pathetic.

A big reason for that was indolence--utter laziness, inattention to detail, concern directed to personal comfort and enrichment rather than the pursuit of "evil," which can be a lot of work.

Edit: That's Scalia's problem. I suspect the particular error here is one I encountered countless times in the law business--we called it "fact flipping"--where multiple editors massage an inconvenient fact until they "flip" it to become the exact opposite of what it really is. Once the formerly inconvenient fact is turned into an asset, the editors drop it and leave it for the lazy-ass boss to look at it. But Scalia probably had a back room reserved at Ruth's Chris that day, and didn't notice the error.

Ultimately, Scalia doesn't give a damn, and he'll blame his subordinates for it.