Jul 22 2006
Leaks To Media From Lawyers
As if there are not enough lawyer jokes, Hal Raines of the NY Times states those who have leaked national security details regarding our efforts to stop terrorist attacks on US citizens:
One audience member asked about the role of media leaks. Raines opted not to go in-depth since he no longer is a working journalist, but offered a bit of a leak of his own:“Almost all leakers are lawyers. That’s the bottom line.”
It is a well known fact that most elected leaders in Congress are Lawyers, as are their staff. So Raine’s has at least increased the probabilities that the leaks of our national security did indeed come from the halls of Congress and a severely desparate minority party willing to do anything to win an election.
Didn’t Clinton line the Halls of State with Lawyers? Didn’t Bush keep all of them?
I would think the leaks are split between our Elected Officials and Clinton’s hand picked mouth pieces.
Aren’t Clinton and Mrs. H Lawyers?
AJ,
It is interesting that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell are all non-lawers.
Attorneys are process oriented whereas businesspeople and military people are results oriented.
“Attorneys are process oriented whereas businesspeople and military people are results oriented.”
And that leads to some fundamental frustration between the two different types. Lawyers are not only process oriented in how they go about functioning, they value the mecanism of the process and the maintenance of it. Results oriented people see that as a waste of resources. Spending hours arguing some fine point of process is time wasted in getting something done, particularly when they have a good idea of what needs to be done to produce a given result.
Lawyers see engineers as lose cannons. Engineers see lawyers as great wasters of time, money, and energy who place great value on things that don’t matter. They two also view failure differently. An engineer expects to find many problems along the way to perfection. A lawyer wants perfection the first time around. A results oriented person will deploy something with obvious flaws that can be cleaned up later as long as they don’t impede the overall result. A process oriented person sees the flaws as reason not to deploy.
The two kinds of people live in different cultures and tolerate each other but that’s about it. I see plenty of battles between those two mindsets each month.