{"id":1392,"date":"2007-06-29T21:38:52","date_gmt":"2007-06-30T02:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/06\/29\/clueless\/"},"modified":"2007-06-29T21:42:46","modified_gmt":"2007-06-30T02:42:46","slug":"clueless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2007\/06\/29\/clueless\/","title":{"rendered":"clueless…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Their Confidence is Meaningless<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
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Bush and Vice President Cheney’s optimistic predictions about the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have proved to be almost completely and consistently wrong for years now. ("Last throes," anyone?)<\/p>\n

Before the 2006 election, White House political guru Karl Rove was supremely self-assured in his public predictions of Republican victory.<\/p>\n

White House spokesman Tony Snow recently assured the press corps that Bush had enough votes in the Senate on the immigration bill. "I’ll see you at the bill signing," Bush himself told a skeptical journalist on June 11.<\/p>\n

Bush and his staff’s credibility regarding statements of "fact" is a frequent subject of debate. But their track record on predictions is something else entirely. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that those predictions are unreliable.<\/p>\n

I mention this because Bush’s core argument against a troop drawdown in Iraq — something supported by a large majority of Americans — is basically a prediction. As he put it again yesterday: "If we withdraw before the Iraqi government can defend itself, we would yield the future of Iraq to terrorists like al Qaeda — and we would give a green light to extremists all throughout a troubled region. The consequences for America and the Middle East would be disastrous."<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Froomkin puts the Administration’s track record on predictions well – "… those predictions are unreliable." It’s still hard for me to get my mind around how incredibly wrong they’ve been. They’ve done lots of things that I’ve personally thought were disasters, but that’s not their only kind of wrong-ness. Their predictions are more like a catalogue of ther wishes than estimations based on fact. It’s staggering, really. Bad motives, secrecy, and deceit are one thing – being clueless is something else. But they’ve always got an explanation for their being wrong – an explanation revealed after the fact. I had a fantasy as I read that last installment of the Washington Post<\/strong> series. In my mind I saw Cheney saying that it was a shame all those Salmon in the Klamath River committed suicide….<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Their Confidence is Meaningless Bush and Vice President Cheney’s optimistic predictions about the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have proved to be almost completely and consistently wrong for years now. ("Last throes," anyone?) Before the 2006 election, White House political guru Karl Rove was supremely self-assured in his public predictions of Republican […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}