Dubya, I Gots Yer MBA Right 'ere

Juan Cole gives the businessperson's argument on the rejection of George W. Bush for another term:

Bush's basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses...

What if the CEO convinced himself that the Mesopotamia Corp. was planning a hostile takeover? What if he had appointed a lot of senior vice-presidents who were either incompetent boobs or had some kind of backroom deal going with crooked brokers, and fed him false information that Mesopotamia Corp. was making a move and had amassed a big war chest for the purpose? And what if, to avoid this imaginary threat, he launched a preemptive hostile takeover of his own, spending at least $200 billion to accomplish it (on top of the more than $400 billion he is already losing every year)? Remember, it was a useless expenditure.

It turns out that Mesopotamia Corp. was a creaky old dinosaur with no cash reserves, and couldn't have launched a hostile takeover of the neighborhood mom and pop store. And, moreover, its arena of operations is extremely dangerous, and nearly a thousand America, Inc. workers get killed taking it over. And it turns out that the managers that the CEO put into Mesopotamia Corp. were bunglers. They adopted policies that made the taken-over employees bitter and sullen and uncooperative. Instead of standing on its own, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mesopotamia, Inc., requires continued infusion of capital from America, Inc. It looks increasingly as though Mesopotamia, Inc., will have to be let loose, and that its new managers will opt for interest-free Islamic banking as soon as they can.

Meanwhile, the real threat of a hostile takeover comes from al-Qaeda, Inc. Because 138,000 employees had to be assigned to Mesopotamia, Inc., there are few left to meet that challenge.

So given this kind of record, do you vote this CEO back in? It is often said that a lot of Americans want to stick with Bush to "see Iraq through." But if you think about him as a CEO, and look at how well he has run things, you can see the idiocy of this argument. The real question is, do you throw good money after bad?