Over the weekend I read Jane Mayer's article about the CIA's secret interrogation program from the August 13 New Yorker. Near the end of the article, Mayer writes this:

By 2004, there were growing calls within the C.I.A. to transfer to military custody the high-value detainees who had told interrogators what they knew, and to afford them some kind of due process. But Donald Rumsfeld ... refused to take on the agency's detainees, a former top C.I.A. official said. "Rumsfeld's attitude was, You've got a real problem." Rumsfeld, the official said, "was the third most powerful person in the U.S. government, but he only looked out for the interests of his department --not the whole Administration."

Isn't that sort of thing characteristic of the whole administration? Let's face it, Rumsfeld didn't just favor the interests of his department over those of the administration, he favored them over the interests of the country. (Actually, his focus was even narrower: he favored the interests of just the civilians in the Defense Department; he was too focused on his war with the career military to care what happened to the administration or the country.)

Cheney's like that, too -- he cares more about amassing executive-branch power than he does about the country. And Bush clearly cares more about aggrandizing himself than about the country.

All three of those guys have been CEOs or entrepreneurs, and they all seem to act as if they're fighting -- fighting other parts of the government, fighting the public -- for power and market share. It may be a good way to run a business, but it's no way to run a country.