Finally, an Explanation for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld

You knew there had to be one somewhere, didn't you. I reached back a few years to a psychological study completed in 1999. The study, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," was completed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Cornell University.

The study makes three main points:
First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study.

Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or dysfunctional at worst.

Third, and most important to our trio of administration fools, when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

It's not just that Bush surrounds himself with yes men and refuses to acknowledge ideas that challenge his perseption of reality. It's that he is so incompetent that he does not realize he is incompetent.