What Did She Study in High School?

Maybe the story is apocryphal, maybe not, but here it is anyway, courtesy of the Republican National Convention blog:

When Dana Perino was six years old, she stood on a milk crate in her Denver house, held up an American flag, and told her parents, "I'm gonna work in the White House." By third grade, she and her father, Leo Perino, were debating the news of the day at the dinner table.

"He wanted me to have read the newspapers and to have picked out one or two articles to discuss by the time he got home and then we always watched the evening news together and my Dad and I would always watch the Sunday shows as well," said Perino.

Which makes it even more bizarre that the president's press secretary never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After all, she's an educated person -- Ponderosa High School, the University of Southern Colorado, grad school at the University of Illinois, work on the Hill, and so forth.

And the event she says she never heard of isn't some arcane happening from ancient history. It played out only ten years before she was born. And it wasn't just any ordinary event. It was arguably the Cold War's scariest threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, also known as M.A.D. It was the time when U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev (check) faced off over Soviet ballistic missiles being stationed in Cuba, 90 miles from the Florida coast. Long story short: Nikita blinked first and M.A.D. was averted.

Now, not to be uncharitable, none of us can know everything. And Ms. Perino's cluelessness is nowhere near as egregious as the President not knowing that there are Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs before he invades a country where both groups live.

But the Perino deficit strikes me as emblematic of much that's wrong in the Bush administration:

A secretary of defense who knows nothing about military history, military strategy, or how the military works. An assistant secretary of state who is a defeated candidate for a governorship with no refugee experience put in charge of dealing with the millions fleeing from Iraq. An undersecretary of state charged with resurrecting America's "image" abroad whose preparation for the job was as a Texas TV reporter. Another put in charge of immigration and border security with no relevant experience whatever. A pro-consul in Iraq with no Middle East experience, much less languages, filling Green Zone jobs so long as the applicants vow to repeal Roe v. Wade. And, of course, that heck-of-a-job guy who ran FEMA. The list goes on and on.

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was a young, eager, and very low-level functionary in the Kennedy administration (I was thrilled that someone higher up thought enough about me that they assigned me a secret spot in a secret tunnel in a secret mountain in North Carolina - in case the entire government had to relocate).

The Kennedy administration certainly wasn't perfect. The White House, for example, could have made good use of a few people with gray hairs and knowledge of how you talk to a senator. But the huge preponderance of the president's 3,000-plus political appointees were people who had spent their entire adult lives preparing for the jobs they got. They really knew what they were doing. JKF's best and brightest were neither ideologues nor political hacks, though there were a few of both. By and large, they were dedicated and they were competent.

I fear that history will look back on the time of George W. Bush not only as a time of American arrogance, American exceptionalism, and America's abandonment of its most dearly treasured principles. I also fear that the judgment of history will serve to strengthen right-wing canards about government not being able to do anything right.

My hope is that the next administration will choose people who can get it right.

Comments

[jackstraw005]

in all fairness to dana pinnochio, maybe this administration has reached a point where they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. perhaps there were more qualified people who were offered the job but decidede being the janitor was just more dignified, or deleting e-mails left them more time with their families.

[larstein]

Is it possible that Dana Purina was simply pulling the chain? Goppers love to play dumb. It's an old Southern country lawyer tradition to make the city slickers think they're sooooo smort, when the REAL Amurcuns know histree is booshit. What's really going on is that everything Purina says is just pure dog food, and we're the dogs. Watch "Taledega Nights" as a drama, not a comedy, and you'll get the picture.

[alkamm]

Nebraska senator Roman Hruska famously argued there was a place for mediocrity on the Supreme Court. Though his comment was widely mocked, the reality of his sentiment was put into place with the appointments of such as Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts, not to mention the deceased popinjay, Rehnquist.
These Republicans have filled government with Christianists from that Liberty College--people who will believe anything, even the idea of a hateful Christ they can worship in the form of their televangelist hillbilly snake-oil salesmen.
By abiding these awful stooges in power, more reflective Republicans got their tax cuts, but they will reap the whirlwind in climate change and the political and economic upheaval that will come from their lack of planning, impotent secrecy, and willful ignorance.
Emblematic of their foolishly blind leadership is the fact that they listen only to Fox news which apologizes for all they do and repeats whatever talking point handed them. Fox is the home of the appeasers of idiots. Even Republicans deserve better.
Mediocrity would look pretty good compared to these low grade morons, with all due respect.

[Qbear]

my guess is a lot of phy-ed

[faust2001]

Th best and the brightest are simply not going to be accepted in this administration. They are too skeptical and intelligent, not to mention competent at what they do. This administration is a bastion of the mediocre and the hustler. It's sad.

[h20bird]

I do not want a "normal guy" in the White House any more than I want a "typically educated" woman for a press secretary. These are highly-elevated positions with undeniable international influence, and we deserve better. Perino humiliated all of us with her ignorance. When she guest-starred on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" she tried to play it off--like some kind of dumb blonde. Atrocious.

[ljsfolly]

Dana needs to write and history book of her own: What I Did In School, why I missed my history lessons from grade school through university. It never is encouraging to find out how little the bushies know. Also Dana could talk to the dick cheney and he has a view on history bound to teach and scare her.

[outnow]

The Cuban missile crisis illustrates the policy of nuclear inspections, regime change, and the entire cold war. I lived through that crisis. I cannot believe that anyone would not understand that JFK faced down the Russians who had nuclear missiles on the island aimed at the US.

I agree that Bush has appointed people how are "qualified" because they will do his dirty work. He in turn is doing the dirty work for the elites who capitalize on his policies. The religious right really gets nothing out of it because they are being duped. The leaders of the religious right get tax deductions and faith-based initiatives, but the church members get absolutely nothing out of it.

Crony capitalism creates a class of people who value power rather than education. Bush is the poster child for the Republican who doesn't know the issues or history but wants to "believe," i.e., accept a proposition without any proof.

Dana Perino is just beginning to understand that she cannot answer questions where there is nothing but lies and cover ups going on. She lacks the education necessary for what used to be required for a high school diploma.

JFK wanted inspections to confirm that there were no WMDs on the island. He wanted regime change. Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro followed. This is vitally important history for United States policy in the later half of the twentieth century and the first decade of this century.

Only on George W. Bush's watch could something this stupid occur. An ideologue is not an educated person. To the contrary, an educated person learns history, examines the facts and then draws a conclusion. After preforming a proper analysis of the facts, a policy is implemented.

Being faith-based means that the fact-gathering is never done, an analysis never performed, and a rational never policy implemented. This indeed characterizes everything about the Bush administration. The ideologues have a policy that they implement using incompetent people who want to "believe" rather than to investigate the facts, analyze the facts, and then draw conclusions.

[Desiderata]

Get a grip. Nobody thinks the Bush Administration hired Dana Perino for her mind.

[Zenobius]

This probably misses the point.

This administration starts with a vision of what they want. They then appoint people who believe that this is possible.

If what they want is possible, and a reputable expert can be found to back it, they seem to be willing to appoint him or her. When what they want is impossible, they find someone who will adhere to the party line and push for it anyway.

A lesser strand is that some things that you or I might think are important, like FEMA, are less important in the Bush scheme of things. So these jobs can be filled with political hacks at no risk to anything Bush cares about.

The effect, oddly, resembles Stalinism. If real genetics does not conform to what you want, you appoint Lysenko.

In short, the assumption that competence is the issue assumes that understanding of the real world is what Bush wants. I don't think that this is the case.

[Morag]

I can't believe I'm writing this, but...

In her defense, there's a lot of truth to what Dave Barry once said about history classes starting at the dawn of time and ending at Harry Truman. I distinctly remember only studying the Cuban Missile Crisis in my government class, and that was senior year.

That covers high school.

How she got that job without picking the information up in college remains a mystery, however.

[mommadona]

You know....if normal people come to work in Washington DC, it's going to be SUCH a change, I don't know HOW we're going to handle it.....