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"We now know that as CEO, Cheney got snookered into a disastrous merger that has since sent Halliburton's stock price plummeting..."

Once I saw that lie, I quit reading the "article".

If the author won't write that it was a massive abuse by trial lawyers that brought a huge jury award against Haliburton (for asbestos liability of a small firm that Haliburton purchased) that sent HAL's stock price down the drain AFTER Cheney had left the company, then what good is listening to anything else that he/she/it has to say??

It's interesting how the writer begins denigrating the administration at the beginning of sentences, but by the end negates his own opening remarks. And he does this constantly through out the article.

Let's be honest. As upset as you may have been in January 2001 that George W. Bush was going to be president, you had to admit he had a pretty impressive team.

On the merits, the collapse of the Bush administration's energy policy or its bumbling on Social Security were missteps of at least as great a magnitude. Yet nobody leaked details about the internal struggles, and so no accusations were leveled and no one had to admit that anything had gone wrong. Robbed of these particulars, journalists had a difficult time writing the story, since, in the absence of juicy narrative, they would be required to explain and analyze policy matters. And that's not a story most journalists are equipped to write.

. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, the administration insisted they were going to do it anyway, believing that if you project confidence and invincibility, others will come around. And to a remarkable extent that's just what happened.

In the Bushies' lexicon this is called "leadership." And to some extent it is. Getting people to follow you by force of personality, persuasion, and will is the essence of leadership. In fact, some of the qualities that make the president so great at scamming the policy process proved to be his greatest strengths in the first phases of the war. Bush was supremely confident and appropriately indifferent to complexities that might have distracted a more thoughtful, but less resolute, individual (read Bill Clinton ).

And I will leave you with this little subliminal slip.

"leadership" is just a confidence game. And over time, that kind of leadership will get its butt kicked by reality every time.

And he is absolutely right, Clintonian con game leadership got it's butt kicked in Somalia, and The USS Cole, and the Embassy's and the WTC TWICE .