Today's More Important News: Simulation Shows 400,000 Troops Were Needed In Iraq

At CNN.com.

A lot of important things follow from this, and I'm not going to try to enumerate them all here before having some coffee, or I might say something intemperate.

But if this information is true, and if such simulations are really the best information available to us about such things, then whichever decision-makers--or should I say 'deciders'?--knew about this and ignored it should immediately be fired. And legal action of some kind might even be considered if such a course of action is available.

Furthermore, this has consequences for decisions about what we do next in Iraq. This seems to provide strong evidence for a claim that most of us came to believe long ago: that we cannot simply "stay the course." So we apparently have to choose between putting in more troops--lots more troops--or just getting the hell out. I am inclined to think that the preponderance of evidence indicates that if we just get out we'll turn a monumental disaster into a disaster of world-historical proportions...but my opinion is worth almost nothing on this topic.

I suppose that there is no longer any doubt that this administration will go down in history as one of the very worst.

It's one thing to have bad judgment--I myself am a pointy-headed intellectual who can't keep his bills paid on time, his house clean, or his important papers in order. I've got certain virtues as a human being, but good practical judgment and the ability to get things done are not necessarily among them. But, see, I know this. That's why I wouldn't seek to be president even if such a thing were possible for an unmarried, inhaling, atheistic philosopher with a knack for alienating both the right and the left. I wouldn't be a good president in part because I don't understand public policy or international affairs well enough, and in part because my practical judgment isn't particularly good--but at least I'm smart enough to realize these things.

The current occupant of the White House and his Roving chorus of yes-men don't seem to realize that they're not particularly smart nor good at what they're doing. These guys remind me of a certain character type familiar in academia--the student (and in some cases, God help us, the professor) who isn't very smart, but who decided long ago that he was. Such people identify with intellectuals--that's who they want to be, what they think of themselves as--and, though they just don't have what it takes, they smash ahead relentlessly as if they did. The result is usually heart-wrenching, but sometimes disastrous, even just in academia.

These sons of bitches are running our country into the ground, and anybody with a lick of sense would have known better.