Chris DeMuth, Hack Extraordinaire The leader of President Bush's favorite think tank bids adieu.
By Timothy Noah
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 roboticLaurie 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-upYou guessed it. defender of the Iraq invasion, was an AEI fellow. So was concerning a high-paying job he'd arranged for his girlfriend), where did he land as a visiting scholar?
Tip of The Hat To P's Musings Reader, Peter
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