Wilkerson op-ed piece in today's LA Times

For those of you who didn't participate in the Red Eye diary and thread, it was announced that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff while Secretary of State, has an op-ed piece in this morning's Los Angeles Times.

Here's a link to that op-ed piece, which is guaranteed to delight and amaze you:
The White House cabal .

I think that the op-ed piece goes beyond the speech Wilkerson delivered last week, but you'll have to make up your own minds about that.  I quote my favorite sentences from the end of the piece below the fold.

The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control. At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it....

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.