What September 11, 2001 Taught Us: There Are No Adults in the Room

The Axis of Evil in American politics is now complete: Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, and Kamala Harris are all on the same side. They will compromise on any of their supposed ideological differences and bury old blood-stained hatchets — remember when the Left called Cheney a war profiteer and blood-crazed jingoist? — in pursuit of a higher goal.

That goal is keeping power in the hands of tiny, privileged elites who despise most lesser Americans. And centralizing such power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, including the power to start pointless wars (see Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine), and flood American cities with tens of thousands of poor immigrants. Remember that it was Bush/Cheney that started the policy of recruiting Somalis and flying them over 10 safe Muslim countries in order to make Minnesota more “diverse.” Mission accomplished!

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Former U.S. President George W. Bush, Laura Bush, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, Lynne Cheney, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore stand as the casket is brought in for the funeral service for U.S. Sen. John McCain at the National Cathedral on September 1, 2018 in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

You could see the coalition taking shape years ago, when all the Best People gathered for John McCain’s funeral in Washington, D.C., and then-President Donald Trump was pointedly disinvited. Our elites air-kissed and traded alligator tears around McCain’s flag-draped casket.  In a touching moment of bipartisan polyamory, George W. Bush and Michelle Obama flirted like 13-year-olds while Barack looked on with a smile.

What unites these power elites beside a haughty contempt for the public they claim to serve? One key qualification that is too little discussed, even among MAGA types: amoral, blasé, dilettantish incompetence, unencumbered by moral principles or basic human empathy.

Few of these high-flying powerbrokers rose to the top on merit. As one of us (John) explained in his September 31, 2022 TED Talk in Davos, Switzerland, these people are sharp-toothed, aggressive “alpha sheep,” whose skill set centers on sniffing out elite opinion, quickly conforming to it, then ruthlessly punishing any member of the herd that steps out of line.

The “Peter Principle” beloved of management consultants predicts that people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence, then stay there. We’re way past that when it comes to the government. There the “Dubya Principle” rockets people right past the positions for which they are pretty much incompetent and lands them in jobs for which they are wildly, stunningly unsuited. Then, to keep those positions, they trash the traditional standards by which they might be criticized and “fundamentally transform” the very institutions they were supposed to be serving.

The “Dubya Principle” rockets people right past the positions for which they are pretty much incompetent, and lands them in jobs for which they are wildly, stunningly unsuited.

We can see the Dubya Principle in effect at every level of government, from the unionized public school principal who justifies sinking test scores by denouncing such tests as “racist” all the way up to Joe Biden napping and hiding through his entire presidency.

But there were three stunning instances of the Dubya Principle in action that changed all of our lives, and ended the lives of many, from the sidewalks of New York City to the smoking streets of Mosul and the pestilential nursing homes of American blue states. I’ll go through them in chronological order:

The September 11, 2001 Train Wreck

Politico reported back in 2015:

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

The FBI didn’t follow up on reports of Arab immigrants learning to take planes into the air, but not to land them. The Bush administration essentially shrugged off the CIA’s warning, and was caught flat-footed by attacks that should have been prevented.

Instead of facing a furious backlash for their failures, our intelligence agencies dodged accountability and instead were rewarded with vast new funding and sweeping new powers to surveil and harass Americans in the form of the Patriot Act. The only bin Ladens caught by Bush’s people were the wealthy members of his extended family, whom Bush quickly collected and flew first-class out of the reach of congressional questioning. The Dubya Principle prevailed.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

The next, far bloodier instance of weaponized incompetence came in the propaganda campaign on behalf of invading Iraq. That politically fragile country, with large and vulnerable religious minorities, played no part in the 9/11 attacks. It had been starved and impoverished by crushing sanctions, which caused the deaths of some 250,000 Iraqi children. “Worth the price,” Madeleine Albright shrugged. What’s more, Iraq had under pressure dismantled all its programs for developing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

For cynical reasons of geopolitical strategy, Bush and his faction of empire-building neoconservatives were hell-bent on sparking a U.S. invasion and occupation of that country. And so their operatives and publicists set about on a year-long campaign to find scraps of dodgy intelligence that could be twisted to support a war, then “stovepipe” it over the heads of actual competent experts in the CIA so Colin Powell could cite it when speaking to the U.N., and Fox News could trumpet it to a gullible GOP.

The Iraq War caused between half a million and one million civilian casualties; the devastation was so appalling that we might never know the actual totals. It saw the destruction of ancient Christian communities, the rape camps set up by ISIS, the slaughter of innocent Yezidis, and the resurgence of Iran as the hegemon in the region. And as he was leaving office, Bush had the staggering gall to joke in a cynical skit about the fictitious WMDs, even as Gold Star families mourned their losses, traumatized veterans tried to piece their lives back together, and Iraqi Christians huddled in shipping containers through the winter.

The COVID Virus, and Weaponized COVID Panic

Do you know where the COVID virus came from? From bioweapons research long funded by the U.S. government and led by Anthony Fauci, which got outsourced to China to avoid public criticism. Do you know who put Fauci in the virus weaponizing business? That was Dick Cheney, who panicked after the anthrax attacks and decided that the U.S. needed to make new bioweapons, regardless of laws forbidding that. Read The Blaze’s stunning exposé that connects all the dots, and makes it so unsurprising that Cheney now backs the party of lockdowns, forced vaccination, and big-money, Big Pharma transgender therapies.

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But the failure of our “best and brightest” in the COVID panic went much, much further than simply producing a deadly virus in a leaky Chinese lab. Our medical experts, public health authorities, lawmakers, and tragically even President Trump completely mishandled the response to the COVID outbreak. As Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute reported, the idea for forcing an unprecedented global lockdown goes back to the Bush administration, and originated — I’m not making this up — as the high school project of a senior researcher’s daughter. But instead of putting it up on the refrigerator, this scientist helped make lockdowns public health orthodoxy.

Likewise, the rush to produce a “vaccine” blew past every traditionally mandated safeguard, past the Nuremburg Code — which forbids forcing experimental drugs on people — and past the moral safeguards of most of the pro-life movement, as well as the moral safeguards of most of our pastors, including Pope Francis.

The Dubya Principle prevailed, and if the Democrats win this November, it might as well be added to the U.S. Constitution, and George W. Bush recognized as the Man of the Century.

Jason Jones is a contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.