Slate: The Most Powerful Bushie You've Never Heard Of

[Hissyspit]

http://www.slate.com/id/2175768/nav/tap3/

Chris DeMuth, Hack Extraordinaire
The leader of President Bush's favorite think tank bids adieu.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007, at 9:31 PM ET

Christopher DeMuth
Not to be outdone by Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Tony Snow, Christopher DeMuth announced on Oct. 11 that he will leave the Bush team. Unlike these other Bush loyalists, DeMuth has not occupied a West Wing office—not lately, anyway. (Between college and law school, DeMuth logged two years as a staff assistant in Richard Nixon's White House.) Instead, DeMuth has for the past two decades been president of the American Enterprise Institute, which more than any other nonprofit think tank in Washington has been the wellspring of President Bush's worst ideas. DeMuth is now relinquishing that post, though he plans to remain as a senior fellow.

The Iraq war was, to a remarkable extent, an AEI production. Vice President (and Hawk-in-Chief) Dick Cheney was an AEI fellow immediately before joining the Bush White House, and his wife Lynne still is. Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy and, outside of Cheney, the most robotic defender of the Iraq invasion, was an AEI fellow. So was Laurie Mylroie, the leading academic proponent of the crackpot theory that Iraq was behind 9/11. Richard Perle is an AEI scholar. So is John Bolton. So is John Yoo, the Bush Justice Department's former torture maven. When former Pentagon Deputy Secretary and Iraq hawk extraordinaire Paul Wolfowitz resigned as president of the World Bank (over a dust-up concerning a high-paying job he'd arranged for his girlfriend), where did he land as a visiting scholar? You guessed it.

The leading neoconservative publication, the Weekly Standard, argued forcefully for deploying troops to topple Saddam (though subsequently it's had more than a few quarrels with the Pentagon's conduct of the war). The Standard is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., not AEI … but its office is in the AEI building (which is nice for the Standard's editor because his dad is an AEI "senior fellow emeritus").

According to DeMuth, the current military "surge" in Iraq was invented at AEI. (It certainly wasn't invented by the generals.) Should the United States bomb Iran in the near future, feel free to blame AEI for that, too.

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[illinoisprogressive]

1. Kristol's dad was the founding member of the neocons and the ideas they hacked up

[gateley]

2. K&R nt

[Swamp Rat]

3. Send him and the rest of AEI to Guantanamo for retirement.

:puke:

[riverdeep]

4. And yet, these same think tanks are given credibility in the media to this day.

Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, any number of tanks with the word 'Freedom' in them. They regularly have access to the high level opinion makers and 'news' shows. You'd think someone would just look at their track record of failure and raise some flags, but no.

[Emit]

5. Here's where AEI falls in the entire web of 14 organizations:

PDF: http://www.opednews.com/toenjes_IraqPolicyWeb_withTables_July19.doc