State of War

The New York Times has been the butt of jokes by conservatives for a brand of reasoning peculiar to liberals. "Why do we keep putting so many people into our prisons when the crime rate is going down?" was the formulation. Yuk yuk.

Then I picked up State of War : The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration by James Risen, and got as far as the prologue. This stopped me dead in my tracks:

"The ease with which the Bush administration has been able to overcome bureaucratic resistance throughout the government has revealed the weaknesses of both the military's officer corps and the nation's intelligence community. In very different ways, the army and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have traditionally served as gravitational forces supporting the status quo. Dominated by career professionals, both institutions abhor sudden change and tend to force policy towards the middle."

Mind you, this is offered as a criticism of the Bush administration!