any time there's a big organization, that organization will have internal politics. and anytime there is internal politics, someone will be such a pain in the ass that some portion of the internal politics will be about managing the difficult person.
that principle really derives from the asshole rule: if you get a group of ten or more people together, at least one will always be an asshole. if you remove the asshole (and the group is still over ten people),1 one of the previously non-assholes will develop assholish characteristics. it's as if groups are haunted by an asshole spirit that must always inhabit a host body. remove the host and the spirit will just move on to a new one.
but i digress. this post isn't supposed to be about the asshole rule. it's about how an asshole affects the internal politics of organizations. the usual way that plays out is that the majority finds a way to work around the difficult person, cutting them out of the decision-making process as much as possible to avoid unnecessary difficulties.
in the bush administration, cheney seems to be the difficult person. so secretary of state rice came up with work around.
even though the article is more about rice and cheney, what's interesting about this article is what it says about the president. as it recounts cheney's obstructionism was always in the name of the president: "In one instance, Mr. Cheney stepped into the Oval Office to put an end to a discussion under way in Beijing, when he feared an agreement setting out steps for resolving the nuclear standoff lacked the tough language on disarmament that he believed Mr. Bush wanted." bush's later statements seemed to endorse cheney's hard-line approach.
but when rice cut cheney out of the process and signed the north korea deal this week, the president backed rice's approach: "Mr. Bush, asked at a news conference on Wednesday about Mr. Bolton's critique [of the North Korea deal], was succinct: 'I strongly disagree — strongly disagree with his assessment.'"
overall bush comes across as an empty suit. his alleged subordinates scurry around trying to get the deal they want, working around other subordinates who might think differently. and whatever the result, it seems that bush will endorse it as his own.
since the beginning of his presidency people have claimed that cheney was the real decision-maker in the white house--the real president behind the president. instead, it looks like there is no president. just a white house of competing factions headed by a rubber-stamp executive, who will give presidential approval to anything provided it comes out of his white house. the only reason cheney seemed to be in charge all this time is because others hadn't figured out how to work around him yet.
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1-groups that are small don't necessarily have an asshole. and in high school i decided that ten was the approximate cut off point. determining the real cut-off is a complicated process, beyond the abilities of amateur assholologists like myself. but ten is close enough.
