Wednesday, September 20, 2006
It's not nearly enough to smear the "neocons"...
They have to get their children, too. After all, little neocons grow up to be big, scary, powerful, and dangerous neocons.
7 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Sep 20, 12:03:00 PM:
By what standard was Simone Ledeen “dangerously under-qualified”?
How many other trilingual, major MBA school graduates sought to work in Iraq? MBAs ordinarily try to work at Goldman Sachs or places as much like it as possible.
The entire WaPo attack is bizarre! How much could she possibly have been paid working in Iraq? With what upside?
Is a Baghdad assignment the WaPo's idea of a plum job? Is it “schochu john”’s idea? Is it something like the job Chelsea Clinton got at McKinsey in their New York office? Or like the Revlon job in Manhattan Vernon Jordan tried to arrange for Monica Lewinsky?
The reason that that WaPo scumbag went after Simone was that her younger brother Gabriel Ledeen was and is a Marine officer in Iraq. No reason to bring that up, of course, as it wouldn't do much to reinforce the "chickenhawk" meme.
By , at
Wed Sep 20, 03:37:00 PM:
I'm now taking the last accounting class of my MBA (accounting & finance concentration) and there is simply no way I would consider myself qualified for a post like that. Maybe Simone Ledeen has some more relevant expertise, or maybe there really was no one more capable to take the job (which would be alarming in its own right) but, as John says, NRO makes that case very poorly.
By 
Buce, at
Wed Sep 20, 04:13:00 PM:
Simone Ledeen apparently was qualified by the standards of the time. But it wasn't why she was hired, and is nothing to do with her assignment, which was to advance her own career and the careers of her neocon cronies. Cronyism is indeed an endemic, indeed a pandemic, problem, but "the other guys do it, too," is not a defense. If TigerHawk really wants to make waves on this issue, he might want to tackle the problem of dynastic politics more generally: Clintons and Bushes and Kennedys--and Sharons and Assads, and heaven knows how many other clans and tribes where political preferment is becoming a family business.
Simone Ledeen's real problem is the problem with affirmative action hires everywhere: she's got to believe she deserved it, yet in her heart of hearts, she know that she just passed a phoney test.
By demosophist, at
Wed Sep 20, 04:15:00 PM:
"I'm now taking the last accounting class of my MBA (accounting & finance concentration) and there is simply no way I would consider myself qualified for a post like that."
Heh.
By Lanky_Bastard, at
Thu Sep 21, 07:01:00 PM:
NRO: Our friend's 24-yr-old daughter was perfectly qualified to execute a 13 billion dollar budget in another country.
(Weren't you ready for that kind of responsibility at 24? No, that's 'cause you're a loser.)
Lest I be too harsh, Leeden defends herself from similar charges here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ledeen200407091114.asp
Not that posting at NRO has anything to do with her parentage or political views. She is, after all, perfectly qualified to write for NRO.
By Georg Felis, at
Fri Sep 22, 01:40:00 PM:
I would not have minded an even-handed look at how the post-invasion reconstruction was handled, but this article is a single-minded hatchet job with the preconceived notion that only right-wing political hacks were given jobs in the reconstruction. The sources seem biased in the direction of verbal quotes from disgruntled former employees (strangely enough, none of which were called right-wing) that cannot be verified or countered, and selective cherry picking of the performance of certain high-profile individuals. It was a little strange to see the author deplore the inexperience of MBA Simone Ledeen assigned to the payroll department of the CPA, while the author of the article graduated a year *after* her and was assigned to be the Baghdad Bureau Chief. Hypocrisy anyone?
By inchirieri apartamente cluj, at
Mon Sep 06, 04:29:00 AM:
Neocons support using modern American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries. But who says that the people from other countries want their help, especially through military means? And yes… nepotism I'm sure it works for them too.
