Dumb Texans, in review

Okay I'm trying to get the font types and colors down here, so bear with me here if these don't all match up at first. I doubt anyone is reading this anyway.

Here is a recent story from the New York times regarding the Army's burial of a completely unclassified version of a study conducted by the RAND corporation. As noted by Timothy Noah here, this is the same company whose research appeared in the Pentagon Papers, leaked by one of its employees. The article states:

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The study goes on to slam Tommy Franks and others, but what is galling (aside from fact that the Army buried an unclassified version of a report that already had a top secret version) is that it's a repudiation of the Bush government and its ability to effectively manage departments. Bush was supposed to be the MBA president, but he completely overlooked a pretty well-known phenomenon, the notion of "bureaucratic politics". Although this falls under the purvey of public administration, I would imagine this is not that dissimilar from what one would encounter when driving the Texas Rangers into the ground. Although this horse has been flogged ad nauseum, its worth noting that this administration's penchant for secrecy is only exceeded by its tendency towards complete incompetence.