The Buck Doesn’t Stop By Richard Cohen

It is not heads the American people want, it is humility. That is what’s so lacking in the Bush administration. The real reason — the terribly secret reason — the administration was oh-so-slow to recognize the terrorist threat was precisely the quality so abundant in Rumsfeld: smugness. The Bushies knew it all. The very fact that the Clinton team told them to make terrorism job one led them to denigrate it: What did those Clinton jerks know?

But from the president on down, no one in this administration ever admits a mistake or concedes having been wrong. Dick Cheney, whose slogan should be ”Wrong Where It Matters,” nonetheless takes to the stump to lambaste John Kerry. After all, the vice president is the very man who warned us, assured us, promised us that we must go to war with Iraq because, among other things, that nation had an ongoing nuclear weapons program. None has yet been found — and no apology from Cheney has yet been issued. He was mistaken or dishonest. We await his choice.

What is so perturbing about this administration is not that no one of note has resigned or been fired — and some of them certainty deserve the ax — but that there is not the slightest hint that anyone (except Colin Powell) appreciates that mistakes were made not out of sheer bad luck but because the assumptions, driven by ideology, were so bad. …

In another country, some officials would quit in shame. In this one they can’t even quit being smug.