Best thinking about the Bush Administration I’ve seen yet:

Here I add something I have been
thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table
in the Reagan era. The young, mid-level guys who came to Washington in
the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the
career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways
except bureaucratic warfare, was always going “Ooh, aah, you can’t do
that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their
economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people,
there’s nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada
invasion, it’s needlessly aggressive!” Those guys from State–they were
almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a
way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up
to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White
House knowing who’d been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so
when State and others came in and said, “The intelligence doesn’t
support it, we see no WMDs,” the Bush men knew who not to believe.