You Guys Are The Dumbest Bounty Hunters I've Ever Seen!!

The more I read about the Bush Administration, the more I'm reminded of that classic line from Midnight Run. I know we're not supposed to accuse them of incomeptence, because that lets them off the hook too easily, and in truth this latest outrage is more about deliberate policy prioritizing than anything else. But I don't know how you can say that these people are anything more than bumbling fools after you read this:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.

"How does it happen that the terrorists take over?" asked Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, D-N.Y., at a hearing last Wednesday of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee he chairs. "Is there no adult supervision?"

Keystone Kops doesn't begin to describe this. Terrorists took over American-owned and operated television stations without firing a shot, because we're so arrogant and clueless that we didn't bother to have one Arabic speaker running the station. They had this fantasist notion that they could democratize the Arab world by piping propaganda into their homes, but they care so little about details that they never bothered to learn the language of that propaganda, and they outsourced virtually all the responsibility for the content of the network to Arabic-speaking journalists who they hired nonchalantly without even explaining the mission of Al Hurra to them.

Yes, there is a lot of incompetence going on here. But like I said, this is an outgrowth of the kind of contempt for the details of governance that you see at every level of government in the Bush era. They delegate responsibility relenetlessly because they're so disinterested in the finished product. They believe they can divine the hopes and dreams of Iraqis or Iranians or Yemenis or Saudis without even bothering to learn the slightest bit about their culture or even their language. And like the proverbial bull in a china shop, they stumble in and make everything worse, including giving an outlet to terrorists to promote anti-Israel messages. On a station paid for by American taxpayers.

Incompetence doesn't begin to describe these people. Willful ignorance is more like it.