Nora Ephron: The Answer to the Question Why Didn't George Tenet Just Resign? (HuffPost)

[marmar]

Nora Ephron

05.01.2007
The Answer to the Question Why Didn't George Tenet Just Resign? (40 comments )

No one resigns.

I don't know why anyone thinks anyone does.

Or is ever going to.

The last person who resigned, children, was a man named Eliot Richardson, who was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. This was in 1973, in the midst of Watergate. Richardson happened to resign on a Saturday night, which was one reason why the event was known forever after as the Saturday Night Massacre.

It's been 33 years since then, and I am hard put to think of another major administration figure who has since pulled the plug in order to take a principled stand on anything.

The notion that George Tenet -- or Colin Powell, to take another example of a person we keep asking this question about -- would have resigned just because he knew that the administration was lying about weapons of mass destruction, is truly laughable. "I'm an agnostic," Tenet said to Tom Brokaw the other morning, as if his job simply consisted of providing intelligence and then looking the other way when it was deliberately misused. (Powell has an equally lame excuse, by the way: he travels the country giving speeches in which he covers his behavior by saying that he spent his life in a chain of command and was therefore a man who was used to carrying out orders.)

We have such affection for the idea that people will quit on a matter of principle that it's almost sweet. We believe that they quit for moral reasons, that they quit because they want to take a stand against impropriety, that they quit, willingly quit, because they know right from wrong. Once again, let me say this: no one quits. Even when there's a demand that they quit, they don't quit. Look at Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz, hanging in there in spite of everything. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/the-answer-to-the-questio_b_47420.html

[Demeter]

1. If People Don't Quit, Maybe We Need to Bring Back

firing squads (in either sense of the word "firing")

[DawnIsis]

2. This is the saddest part about our country. No one has principles

or character. In business you are expected to make money at the expense of others. The politicians gather power with no regard for what is best for the American people. We are a selfish nation filled with self-serving asshats.

[Rydz777]

3. It's called "The Wolfowitz Syndrome"

You never resign. You (1) hire a lawyer, (2) get a golden parachute or the "Medal of Freedom," (3) write a book, and (4) get face time with Tim Russert.