A Sharing

I felt the need to share this with you from Opinion Journal's Best of the Web:

It's a classic job interview question: What is your biggest flaw? You're not supposed to say "I have issues with authority" or "Sometimes the urge to embezzle gets the better of me," but rather to engage in a bit of self-flattery. The classic answer is "I push myself too hard." Still, you have to be careful; you don't want your puffery to be so blatant that it's ridiculous. If you said, for example, "I have too much integrity," surely a prospective employer would laugh you out of his office.
But columnist Leonard Pitts says just that about President Bush--and apparently he really does mean it as a criticism. Pitts picks up on the story of Bush "friend" Doug Wead's tape-recordings of private conversations in which the president-to-be comes off quite well. The columnist quotes from a New York Times story on the topic--"The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush"--then explains why this troubles him:

I'm thinking specifically of the invasion of Iraq and the oft-repeated claim that Bush intentionally misled the nation into war--a claim I've never been able to buy. Yes, he and his aides gave us facts that turned out to be fictions. My problem is that I think Bush believed everything he said, mainly because he wanted to believe it. And that if he misled anybody, he misled himself, first. In its way, that's scarier than a lie, suggesting as it does an unwillingness or inability to question beliefs once formed.

So according to Pitts, it's not that BUSH LIED!!!! about Saddam Hussein's weapons. It's not even that he made a mistake (a mistake pretty much everyone but the most ardent Saddam partisans also made). It's that he made an honest mistake. Bush's biggest flaw is he just has too much integrity.