Be A Better Suckup Next Time, Wolfie

That, amazingly, seems to be the thesis of today’s New York Times column by David Brooks about the whole fiasco at the World Bank concerning Paul Wolfowitz and his squeeze, Shaha Riza, who of course was awarded an extremely generous promotion and compensation package when Wolfie got her a job at the State Department working for the contractor SAIC.

Here is how BoBo describes it…

Let’s say you’re a Republican appointed to an important job in Washington. You’ll probably find that 90 percent of the people who work in your agency are Democrats, as are 90 percent of the media types who cover you and 90 percent of the academics who comment on your work.

See, as far as Brooks is concerned, it’s more important to define people in terms of their degree of conservative ideological purity than their actual job competence (and do ya’ think that that mentality has contributed to the misery inflicted on us by Bushco at every opportunity?).

Here’s more…

But here’s the thing to remember: There are Democrats, and then there are Democrats. A quarter of the Democrats you’ll work with are partisans. They believe the rantings of the agit-prop pundits, and they’ll never be open-minded towards you. But the other three-quarters are honorable, intelligent people. If you treat these people with respect, and find places where you can work together, they will teach you things and make you more effective. If you treat them the way you treat the partisans, they’ll turn into partisans and destroy you.

Of course, BoBo doesn’t condescend to inform us of how he arrived at these magical calculations. Such is life in Unaccountable Conservative Pundit Land where, I suppose, we are merely supposed to chant hosannas to the virtues of intelligent design, the free hand of corporate enterprise and war without end while staring blankly at a visage of The Sainted Ronnie Reagan.

Here’s the deal: as David E. Sanger of the Times actually reported in the story I linked to from this post (and noted in bold, just to make sure on the admittedly off-chance that Brooks somehow reads it), Wolfie secured the gig at State for Riza so she could work as an intermediary with the World Bank with Iraq’s reconstruction and try to get the U.N. into the picture also, in sort of a “back door” manner that Bushco knows pretty well. For that kind of a devious move all by itself, Wolfie deserves to get canned.

I’m not going to bother to dissect the rest of BoBo’s froth here, but I will note that he actually makes a good point…

Most scandals are pretexts for members of an establishment to destroy people they don’t like.

I absolutely agree.