Look out, Mr. Bish!

From Mark Steyn:

"The CIA, as I wrote a couple of years back, now functions in the same relation to President Bush as Pakistan's ISI does to General Musharraf. In both cases, before the chief executive makes a routine request of his intelligence agency, he has to figure out whether they're going to use it as an opportunity to set him up, and if so how. For Musharraf, the problem is the significant faction in the ISI that would like to kill him. Fortunately for Bush, if anyone at the CIA launched a plot to kill him, they'd probably take out G. W. Bish, who runs a feed store in Idaho."

The whole article is devastating both in its argument and its humor, rather like P. J. O'Rourke when he's on a roll (though Steyn's mix is weighted a bit more to analysis). "Even before the latest budget-bloating ''reforms,'' the U.S. government was spending $30 billion annually on intelligence, and in return its intelligence agencies got everything wrong. British and French intelligence also get a lot of things wrong, but they get them wrong on far smaller budgets… U.S. intelligence needs a fresh start, and short of buying ol' Sandypants [Sandy Berger] a larger pair of trousers and getting him to smuggle out every single classified document, it's not clear how it's ever going to get it." Good stuff for amateur policy-wonk spectators like me.

The Peril

Hat tip to Instapundit