'They're clowns'

Atrios at Eschaton has some excerpts from Jonathan Alter's (Newsweek) appearance on the O'Franken Factor [to]day:

"the level of incompetence here is so staggering here, and yet there's this gap between how astonishingly incompetent...and we can go over particulars in the last year if you want to... how astonishingly incompetent they've been and the perception is still of them as solid citizens..."
...

"The only way you can sort of start to let the public know is to say no. They don't know what they're doing. They're clowns."
..

"I was among those people who was deceived. When I was told by administration officials that they were working on a nuclear weapons program - Paul [W]olfowitz told that to me directly. It did cause me some alarm and cause me some sense that it was not worth the risk to not take Saddam out."