New research has shown that overconfidence is associated with lower performance in war games. This suggests that cocky people (everyone in the Bush administration) are bad military leaders.
http://tinyurl.com/...
The funnier version of this story is at Sploid:
http://tinyurl.com/...
I am, with this research, reminded of Rumsfeld's loss of a major war game simulating a conflict in the Middle East that Rumsfeld refused to recognize:
http://tinyurl.com/...
Typical.
At the end of the article comes the lightning rod quote: ""One wishes that members of the Bush administration had known about this research before they initiated invasion of Iraq three years ago," he adds. "I think it would be fair to say that the general opinion of political scientists is that the Bush administration was overconfident of victory, and that the Iraq war is a debacle." That is going to be the right-wingers' excuse to call this research "biased" and subsequently discount it.
Another relevant political quote is this one: ""Perhaps most disconcerting is that today's leaders are above-average in narcissism," added Malle, referring to Arnold M. Ludwig's "King of the Mountain: The nature of political leadership," which ranks 377 world leaders in six categories."
I am also reminded of a Republican, Abraham Lincoln, who won the Civil War and is often conjured up by contemporary Republicans who try to justify their ideas. Lincoln was a depressive: http://tinyurl.com/... (subscription required for whole article)
Now, we have scientific proof that George W. Bush and his PNAC (soon to be defunct, I hear) buddies have no business managing wars. What do we do with it?
For instance: "Republicans' Soviet-style overconfidence in their own correctness in the face of damning facts is getting Americans killed. And science proves it."