Paul's contract calls for severance equal to one year's pay (i.e. $400K) based on completing at least one year on the job (which he has).

Watch closely to see whether he gets something more.

Professor John Stuart Blackton

Neocons have a missing gene in their DNA - the one that acknowledges mistakes and then learns from them.

the man with the ten year invasion plan for Iraq

The plan was 10 years old vs. a plan for Iraq that involved guidance and strategy for 10 years.

And for this, Wolfie will get a severance package of?????

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. Nietzsche

So he was not able to bully everyone to have his way and now he wants them to be nice to him so he can be a bully somewhere else

I hate to ask what about a Neocon's pro-imperialist pro-business ideology our depressingly nonpartisan Steve thinks translated into a great plan.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

How much has the World Bank screwed over the third world? There's bound to be some corruption involved in all of that.

So do you all think Wolfie did Iraq with only one "strategy"--to please Shaha?

Did the idea that Wolfowitz was some kind of great strategist come from Wolfowitz?

If not from Wolfowitz then it should be said that our opinion makers are morons.

If memory serves, wasn't Wolfowitz one of those who said, in the late 70s or early 80s, that CIA's assessment of a weakening Soviet Union was wrong. Wasn't he one of the group that said the USSR had never been stronger and was growing stonger by the day? Wasn't he one of the group in the early 80s that said the CIA shouldn't depend so much on empiricism but should instead use their imagination?

And of course we remember all too well what he said about Iraq.

Just before the invasion he made the incredible statement that US soldiers were greeted as liberators in France in WW II so the same would apply to Iraq.

This man doesn't have the ability of the average person with common sense and a reasonable knowledge of history.

This man should not have served in any capacity in any administration at any time.

To think that he taught at Johns Hopkins is truly amazing. The feeble state of the nation's elites in virtually all fields is a harbinger of seriously bad times ahead.

Neocons and most of the top people in the Bush administration are narcissists. In the trance of narcissism there is a wall insulating the narcissist from any feeling of worthlessness. Ergo, a narcissist never makes mistakes, never uses poor judgement otherwise he might feel worthless which he is immune from feeling.

Maybe it's a missing gene, don't know, but the behavior of the Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonsalez etal bunch definitely satisfies the definition of narcissist.

If Wolfowitz does have "dirt" on other senior World Bank figures, then he should share it now: wasn't he the one who promised to root out corruption?

The World Bank should make no deals with him, and offer him no dignified exit. They should block any "golden parachute" deals, or tie up the legalities of it so that he never gets his blood-soaked hands on the money.

If Wolfowitz wants to hold onto his job and drag the whole Bank down with him, so much the better. Good riddance to the lot of them.

Narcissists, sure. But the Land of Opportunity the WB and IMF positions open up to neocons isn't something to be dismissed.

Robbing and pillaging Iraq and the US Treasury isn't enough for these greedy bastards. It's all about the WORLD now kiddies.

Follow the money.

Wolfie the strategist:

* Licking saliva onto his comb to economize on hair tonic.

* those holes in his socks at the mosque.

* roused by rocket fire in his underwear in his imperial visit to Baghdad in 2003.

A classy guy and Loyal Bushie all around.

"What Happened to Wolfowitz the Strategist?"

Easy. He never existed.

Tom

I'm thinking more along the lines of the Bushites having a neocon operater from the WB in the State Dept.

How did they pass the background checks?

The question now is where will he land. I'm betting that after a "decent interval" he will be back at a university within a hundred miles of D.C. and likely will also get a position on several corporate boards.

His $400.000 bonus will tide him over in the meantime.

None of these guys lived up to their hype. They were all legends in each others minds. Their reputations the product of an eternal circle jerk.

The truth is that they were and are all mediocrities. The tragedy is that they tricked a lot of people into believing their nonsense. The laughter is that they came to believe it themselves.

Something you might want to consider in your analysis of Wolfowitz, and the neocons in general: They deride the "reality based" community by which I take them to mean that they are "men of action". They make things happen. They create realities not try to discern them. That is the modus operandi of all of them.

None of them troubled themselves too much as to what the consequences of invading Iraq would be. Note: Collin Powel's prescient prediction-- that if you break it you will own it--did not deter them at all. Not because they were ignorant of the possibility that things might go sour, but despite that selfsame possibility. Now we are in it. The same rules still apply for them. They will take further actions and leave it to us dilettantes to do the analysis. They look at us as mere scribblers.

I think all of this is a conscious mindset not some fluke convergence of similar personality types. These folks are committed to this method as a theory of political action.

Actually, it is merely another sad case of false dilemma. Either you try to discern reality by studious analysis, OR you change things on the ground by brute force.
In reality if they would have utilized BOTH those methods they might have been far more lethal than they turned out to be.

kosmotropic made the point I wanted to. Let me just add this.

Big Man political theory always has a Magical component. It is expressed differently but always in capital letters. The Big Man has captured the Will, the Spirit, the Zeitgeist, the Vision or most disturbingly the Word.

The Big Man hears and sees things smaller men are deaf and blind to, moreover he has the Will to make it happen.

In pre-Revolutionary Europe they recognized this specifically and openly. It was called the Divine Right of Kings. The King was quite literally God's Vicar on Earth. Post Enlightenment this doctrine became harder to express openly, and Kings quite literally started losing their heads and then their powers. But it always pops up and not just with history's bad boys. There was Magic working openly in the language and belief systems around Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, but you also gets whiffs of it around Churchill and Roosevelt, History seemed in some way to be working through them.

The problem with Bush and Wolfowitz is that they looked in the mirror and saw Chuchill, all the time hearing History whispering in their ears, and simply forgot all about Blood, Sweat, Toil and Tears. They were little men fancying themselves as Big Men.

The Bible has a term for this: Pride Goeth before a Fall.

The Greeks have another one: Hubris. Which might as well be Wolfowitz's middle name.

Me too...previously noted in my 75 years.

Googled the Mafia and found this 19th century definition of Mafia, "... the consciousness of one's own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of ideas."

Scattered among these Mafia types are the ubiquitous political hacks and the floundering results of a rampant nepotism.

Governing this motley crew is the law of Omerta, a law of silence which forbids cooperating at all with the police or the government.

Then there are the media, flacks who must blather b.s. because they know absolutely nothing about the subject, whatever it is, at hand.

The nagging question, at least for me, is how did this happen. How did it happen that we ended up with this government.