When I was doing operations research around the Pershing missile system in Germany, about 30 years ago, I became familiar with the term ‘quick fix’. For every failure on the launch pad, there was a ‘quick fix’, the first thing thing in the diagnostic chain that was to be checked or replaced. There were gnarly problems for which there was no quick fix and there were people who were not very good missile diagnosticians. I remember one crew with a warrant officer who couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a warrant officer named Ken who lived up to his name: he knew everything. My co-worker used to say that the first guy’s quick fix was Ken’s phone number.
I was thinking about Ken when I read Frank Rich this morning. Frank Rich is my ‘quick fix’ for having the goods on a lying Republican. Frank Rich’s columns are all hypertext linked so when he makes a claim, he has the goods to back it up. For example:
To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.