What he is speaks so loudly...

...that I can hardly hear what he's saying, even though Colin Powell's voice is coming through the radio right now, as a local NPR station is running his 9/11 Commission testimony on tape delay for the west coast.

Every word out of his mouth is filtered through my increasing disdain for the pathetic hack, I'm afraid. I've never been a Powell fan, and never understood his appeal to so many folks I generally agree with on many other things. It was with some satisfaction, then, that I read Michael Steinberger's piece in The American Prospect. Steinberger nails Powell's toadskin to the wall, writing that "When Powell was appointed secretary of state, such was his stature at home and abroad that he was widely expected to be the new administration's vicar of foreign policy. Three years on, he finds himself the fig leaf of that foreign policy..."

"On almost every critical issue..." he notes, "...Powell has been the odd man out, his influence minimal to nonexistent.

Steinberger attributes Powell's failures to the Secretary himself, noting that in carving out a career as a bureaucratic functionary, he's consistently had a paucity of ideas, leaving him vulnerable to the people in the Administration who actually think, no matter how wrong-headed their thoughts may be. "The neocons, for better or worse, had a vision, and something usually trumps nothing."

And Powell? He's got nothing.