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Doug Feith, Flimflam ManIn Washington, there are no outcomes. There is only process.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, March 9, 2007, at 12:42 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

"You're plucking language out of a briefing. … It was a criticism. It's healthy to criticize the CIA's intelligence. What the people in the Pentagon was doing was right. It was good government."

Again and again, Wallace tries to yank the subject away from Feith's First Amendment right to question CIA intelligence, from the good-government virtue of skeptical rethinking—from process—to the obvious fact that Feith was in error. But Feith won't have it. This is government. We follow procedures. We address the topics at hand. And, apparently, there are no conclusions and no outcome. Government is a Mobius strip. There is only process, and process never reaches an end point.

With a wave of his hand, Doug Feith can make the big, dumb questions like, "Weren't you wrong to push your country into a tragic failure of a war?" go away. Then it's just a matter of parrying the small, subtle ones. The "stupidest guy on the face of the earth"? I'd say Feith is a genius.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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