Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wanted to make one more comment on the whole Paul Wolfowitz thing that he and Smallholder have been debating over the past few days…
Your Maximum Leader has previously stated that it is likely that someone in this whole mess is lying. Your Maximum Leader has, as stated before, not accepted that it is Wolfowitz that is doing the lying. The key to the whole affair appears to be what the Ethics Committee of the World Bank actually asked Wolfowitz to do concerning his girlfriend, and whether or not the Ethics Committee approved of what he did. From what your Maximum Leader has read, this is the big disconnect that no one seems to be addressing. Your Maximum Leader maintains that if the Ethics Committee asked Wolfowitz to handle the change of status of his own girlfriend, then they are the root cause of the problem. It is unclear, at least from the sources your Maximum Leader has read, what role the Ethics Committee wanted after they may have instructed Wolfowitz to take care of the situation. In a big bureaucracy like the World Bank it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that the Ethics Committee did in fact ask Wolfowitz to take care of the situation himself, and not ask to review what was done. It happens.
Your Maximum Leader is not ready to jump all over Wolfowitz at this point, because it is not clear what the Ethics Committee of the Bank expected of whom. It still seems to him that the Ethics Committee told Wolfowitz to take care of Ms Piza’s status (even suggesting a course to Wolfowitz); then they got upset at the outcome of his actions. That hardly seems like a big scandal - even though it is being made into one. The more your Maximum Leader contemplates it, which frankly will not be for much longer, it seems as though lying might actually be too strong a word. He thinks both sides are doing more posturing and are being selective with the facts that they disclose. It will be interesting (but only mildly) to see what the next few days of the news cycle makes of this story.
As for cronyism in the Bush Administration… As far as your Maximum Leader can tell there is a problem in the Bush Administration with getting qualified people to give different opinions in a host of areas. There is a lot of likemindedness within the White House, and your Maximum Leader thinks it is a problem for Bush. But let us face it, with very few acceptions the only way you get a high level political appointee job in this (or any other) White House is to be a crony of the President or Vice-President.
As for standards of proof and finding of guilt… Your Maximum Leader is growing weary of jumping to conclusions about guilt so soon. While the Smallholder is keen to point out such high-profile (but very dissimilar from this case) instances of people finding guilt early on; your Maximum Leader would direct one’s attention to (the equally dissimilar case of) the unfortunate Duke Lacrosse players - wrongfully accused, but now exhonerated.
As he alluded before, just because a bunch of World Bank employees are saying they didn’t approve of Wolfowitz’s actions, doesn’t mean that Wolfowitz didn’t act in the way they guided him to act.
Carry on.
