Alter joined Keith yesterday on "COUNTDOWN," and discussed the administration, Condi and Iran. I didn't realize there's a new water cooler phrase.
Alter: Now, you mentioned this book about Franklin Roosevelt. Well, everybody remembers that he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It sometimes seems, with the Bush crowd, that their motto is, The only thing we have to use is fear itself. So I think what you could see coming up on these midterm elections is them trying to use fear to restore their political position.

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ALTER: Yes, I think pretty much, which is why there are not a lot of people who expect him to move very much in the polls. And once you're tagged as an incompetent, that's pretty hard to recover from.

I mean, you've got a situation now where, you know, in workplaces across America, if somebody says, He's a real Dick Cheney, what they mean is, a guy who sounds like he has a lot of gravitas in those meetings at your company, and looks the part, but is actually, you know, kind of full of it and can't get the job done when it comes to making a profit.

And so that's where these guys are now. Their credibility for getting the job done has been eroded, I think largely because they surround themselves with these yes-men, the truth doesn't get up the chain of command, as we saw with these trailers. So they—because people feel like if they tell them the truth, they're just going to get their heads bitten off. And as a result, your batting average on decisions goes down, down, down, your competence level goes down, down, down, because you're not making well-informed decisions.