The Stupidest Generation
My favorite bit from The Raw Story’s list of tidbits from Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War?
After the invasion, Dick Cheney’s aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.
That one, at least, is funny in how sad it is. The other revelations (like the fact that an “obscure academic, derided as a virtual crackpot by U.S. law enforcement and the intelligence community, greatly influenced top Bush administration officials”) are just more fodder for how the rest of the world — and historians in 50 to 100 years’ time — will come to view us.
Not as some sort of valiant successor to The Greatest Generation, righteously locked in battle against the forces of darkness. But rather as one of the stupidest generations in American history, which let nearly all of its democratic institutions fail simultaneously.