The one about rising to your level of incompetence.

Providing impressive proof is Porter Goss. He was incompetent enough to have risen to the level of CIA Director under George Bush. Which represents a doubly impressive level of incompetence, simply because of the amount of sheer incompetence that was going around during the Bush administration.

Here’s his defense for having appointed Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo — recently convicted of having accepted bribes from convicted congressman Randy Cunningham, and now awaiting sentencing — to the number three position in the CIA:

Due to public criticism of the CIA after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and criticism of my office after the prior candidate for the Executive Director’s position was withdrawn, it was imperative to me that the selection of the Executive Director position be someone whose personal and professional conduct was beyond reproach. When Mr. Foggo came to speak with me about the Executive Director position in late 2004, I conveyed this requirement to him. I asked him directly whether there was anything I needed to know about his candidacy that would reflect poorly upon the Director’s office or upon the CIA. He denied that there was anything. In reliance upon Mr. Foggo’s assurances, and upon his having cleared the inter-agency vetting process, I selected him to be my Executive Director in 2004.

How else is the Director of Central Intelligence and the head of the CIA to know when a CIA employee is rotten to the core except by asking him and taking his word for it? (And that’s when he’s taking great care to avoid another embarrassing nomination.)

So much of what happened to America in the last eight years makes so much sense in retrospect.