Incompetent
December 20th, 2006 | by Jersey McJones |Incompetence has many faces. There’s that deer-in-the-headlights look, where one may as well close their eyes, lie down fetally with their thumb in their mouth as if waiting for a hawk to swoop them up and drop them into an incompetent war… 
Then there’s the melodramatist, endlessly posing with that speghetti-western look of bravado, so sure of themself yet so obviously empty of competence… 
And then there’s the twisted contortions of the man who knows his incompetence, tries to hide it, but instead flails about in Freudian slips, ticks and angles, conjuring the image of a Mary Shelley monster; a creation of man’s incompetent intentions… 
We are all guilty of incompetence on occasion. “Everybody plays the fool, sometimes,” sang Aaron Neville in that silky voice so competent, and honest. When we admit our failures, our incompetence, we shine. We lift the weight of our incompetence from our soul and move on to better things, more likely more competently. When we hide our incompetence in shame, rationalize it and mask it as something other than what it is, we shadow our faces with morbid darkness like the hooded Emperor of Star Wars infamy. And we’ve learned nothing, accomplished nothing, chronically exaserbating the injury our incompetence has wrought.
How refreshing it would be to hear Senator Clinton rise to the podium and say, “I incompetently voted for this war in Iraq because I was shirking my Constitutional responsibility as a Senator to cynically give Bush enough rope to hang himself without considering the horrific costs his incompetence, and my own, would bare on that country and ours.” But no. Hillary instead says of the alleged threat posed to the greatest empire on Earth from a petty dictatorship under 12 years of seige, “The consensus was the same, from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration, It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared.” Yet even I, a regular schmuck from New Jersey, knew that wasn’t true.
From Bush and Company I would never expect a mea culpa for this war, and certainly not for entering into it in the first place. It was not incompetence that brought us into Iraq. It was malevolence. It was greed and lust for power. It was the same motivation the terrorists employed on their nightmarish visit upon us on 9/11 - to drag us into war, to unite their people under them against a common foe, to scapegoat another people for their own peoples’ incompetence. No, it was not incompetence that brought us into Iraq. In fact, it was done quite competently. What was truly and completely incompetent was the way the war was planned and executed. Though some of the reasons for said incompetence again calls to mind the evils that motivated the war, that those evils were not set aside even just enough to do a better job of it was just more incompetence in and of itself.
And so when Donald Rumsfeld, the man whose incompetent doctrine of war has failed us so miserably, ponders and laments, it is not for his incompetence, but for the incompetence of a “little hillbilly twit,” as Rolling Stone famously called her. Said Rumsfeld, “Clearly, the worst day was Abu Ghraib, seeing what went on there and feeling so deeply sorry that that happened.” Not the days when children were slaughtered in their schoolhouses in “collateral” horror, not the days when “improvised explosive devises” kill and maim by the dozens, not the days when sectarian militias wage hours-long gun battles in the streets, not the days when “enemy combatants” are held without trial and the Constitution is shred to pieces of tragic farce… No, for the man they call “Rummy” the “worst day” was the day we found out that a poor, dumb, little hick girl in a military prison was acting out in a way that poor, dumb, little hick soldiers at war have done for millenia. “Clearly,” Donald is incompetent to his very core.
Bush, of course, is too incompetent a human being to ever realize his own incompetence. I place little blame on him for the steaming pile of failures that are his legacy. His ignorance may not be bliss, but it does, in my eyes, absolve him from most of what he’s done. “Clearly,” he was acting on orders, so to speak. He was simply carrying out the will of those who brought him to power and fame. No, the blame for the failures of Bush rest squarely on those around him, those who funded him, those who advised him, those who enabled him, and the incompetent American voters who believed in him. The Bush presidency was mass incompetence accomple.
Everybody plays the incompetent, sometimes. If we are honest and brave enough to face our failures, we can address them. If we hide them, mask them, or otherwise avert their faces in cowardice, we only make them worse. It is ethical and moral incompetence, perhaps the worst incompetency of them all.
JMJ
