Cognitive dissonance, Canadian style.

From this morning's National Post, an issue piece by Slate's Fred Kaplan on the choice of neo-con Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank -- the more entertaining excerpts:

... On the one hand, this is a man who has displayed strikingly poor analytical judgment as U.S. deputy secretary of defense. You may recall his smug assurances to congressional skeptics that America's troops would be welcomed to Iraq with flowers, and that the war's cost would be reimbursed by post-Saddam oil revenues.

There was also his dismissive riposte to the prediction by Gen. Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army chief of staff, that a few hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed for post-war stabilization...

Wolfowitz is not an economist. He has had little experience in development work beyond a stint as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Indonesia. And because he was the intellectual architect of the war in Iraq, the European members of the World Bank's board are sure to see his appointment as an affront...

And the Post's headline on that piece? "The right man for the World Bank". Fred would be so proud.

BONUS TRACK: Now, Michael Lind over at Salon has a slightly different take on this. Just to tease you with the first few paragraphs:

The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be president of the World Bank, following his commission of a long and costly series of blunders as deputy secretary of defense in George W. Bush's first term, comes as no surprise to those familiar with his career. Wolfowitz is the Mr. Magoo of American foreign policy. Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind.

Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he's friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. He would be the model of a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. His three-decade career in U.S. foreign policy can be summed up by the term that President Bush coined to describe the war in Iraq that Wolfowitz promoted and helped to oversee: a "catastrophic success."

Even the greatest statesman makes some mistakes. But Wolfowitz is perfectly incompetent. He is the Mozart of ineptitude, the Einstein of incapacity. To be sure, he has his virtues, the foremost of which is consistency. He has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.

And it just gets better from there. Go. Read.