The Last to Know

Yet another example of Stupid Intelligence. From today's Washington Post, we read:

Some top administration officials may have been slow off the mark in reading the Pentagon's report on U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners. But Senate staffers, especially those on the relevant armed services, intelligence and foreign relations committees, rushed last week to check things out.

But not so fast. Some Senate aides may have forgotten to go through proper channels to obtain this very secret document by downloading it from the Internet. This is not acceptable behavior.

"As you probably are aware," Mike DiSilvestro, director of the Office of Senate Security, said in an e-mail Wednesday afternoon, "National Public Radio obtained a copy of the DoD report, classified SECRET/NOFORN, and posted it on the NPR website. Naturally, the report is of interest to many Members and staff. If you have not already obtained an official copy of the report from DoD, please do so, rather than printing or downloading the report from NPR."

Furthermore:

A few hours later, Cindy Pearson, assistant chief clerk and security manager for the Senate Armed Services Committee, followed up with an e-mail to her folks saying that DiSilvestro still hadn't heard from the Pentagon. "In the meantime, Mike asks that if you have downloaded a copy of the classified report from the NPR website, please call OSS and advise them, and they will come by your office and pick it up."

Uh... Cindy... Download means, you know, digital. I suspect quite a number of senate staffers have found themselves trying to operate without a hard-drive in their computer today.

Is anyone even thinking about how stupid this is? Everyone in the world can read this report... except for persons working FOR our government who presumably need to be on top of what's going on. To take it further, all the newspapers and magazines in the world are now commenting and quoting this report. Perhaps Senate (and House and committee) staffers should be prevented from reading any news... or watching and newscasts... oops, or logging on to the Internet... Big Bad Classified information out there - they might be contaminated.

And while we're on the subject of 'stupid', can we finally be honest about what the REAL issue is in the upcoming election? Everyone's dancing around it; calling the current resident of the White House 'surprisingly incurious' and a number of other euphemisms, but everyone's afraid to come right out and say it. Well, I'm not - George Bush is too stupid to run a carwash, let alone a country. And he's too arrogant to consider the possibility that he doesn't have a clue.

It would be one thing if he were a nice idiot, like Forrest Gump, or a harmless one like Chauncey Gardiner. But he's not - he's a mean and arrogant idiot, and that's a recipe for the worst kind of bully.

And can we finally stop with the 'oh, but he'll surround himself with competent people' meme? I think that one's been disproved over and over again. Give it up.

It's the stupidity, Stupid.