George Soros has a cliche-ridden wrong-headed polemic against the Bush administration in today’s Puppy Trainer. This is hardly surprising, because he’s openly declared war on this administration, vowing to spend as many of his millions as necessary to end it this fall. But it demonstrates that, just as being smart doesn’t necessarily make one rich, the corollary is apparently true as well–Mr. Soros doesn’t seem to be very smart, at least not about anything other than making money.

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

Hmmmm…a “habit”? Can he cite the innumerable examples of this to justify this statement? In fact, I can’t think of a single instance of “waging personal vendettas.” The only ones that I can think of that Mr. Soros and his ilk might come up with are Valerie Plame and Richard Clarke, but in neither case do these meet the “personal vendetta” threshold.

In the case of the former, while the matter remains under investigation, the simplest explanation to me is that, rather than having the intent of harming Mr. Wilson’s wife, the intent was simply to explain to Mr. Safire why the administration made the dumb decision to send the ambassador to Niger to sip sweet mint tea, instead of making a serious effort to investigate the possibility of yellowcake sales.

As for Mr. Clarke, I hardly think that pointing out inconsistencies in public statements, and conflicts of interest, when under attack, constitute a “personal vendetta.” Yes, they helped damage his credibility, but they were only helping him damage his own–in his apparent mission to attempt to rewrite history, he was much more active in that goal than anyone else.

And as to “one of the worst blunders in American history,” like “the worst economy in fifty years,” such hyperbole might be rhetorically effective with people unfamiliar with American history (which Mr. Soros, not being native born, may very well be), but to those more informed, it sounds more like shrill volume is being used to compensate for a lack of solid argument.

And that’s just the first graf.

…to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering