Agreed! Plenty of blame to go around. When I was younger, I held a lot of anger at Bush, Cheney, and other ideologues whose belief in the righteousness of thei

Agreed! Plenty of blame to go around. When I was younger, I held a lot of anger at Bush, Cheney, and other ideologues whose belief in the righteousness of their cause allowed them to ignore the evidence (no WMDs, no terrorist links), logic (the strategic costs of invasion), or ethics (torture, civilian deaths). Now, though, I find myself a little bit more sympathetic to them: in recent years, American politics have been warped by non-believers—non-believers in democracy, in law, in any cause other than their own power and enrichment. Bush, Cheney, even Rumsfeld, seem to me to be smugly mistaken believers in the justness of their cause, but that’s still a cause other than their own personal power. Erik Prince, in my view—discounting the lurid (but potentially true!) allegations that he believed he was fighting a Christian crusade against non-believers—is a foreshadowing of the Trump era, a privileged and wealthy man wrapping himself in the flag to hide his cynical interest in nothing more than making even more money, in absolutely any way possible. Hard to say what’s worse, of course, but there’s certainly variety.