10 Dumbest quotes of the decade

There were a lot of dumb things said in the 2000s. These are the winners, based on their feculent combination of overweening confidence and total empirical misassessment:

1. "Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground--to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial average." - James K. Glassman, November 2000
2. "One of my highest priorities is to restore investor confidence in Enron. This should result in a significantly higher stock price." - Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, 21 August 2001
3. "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk." - CIA Director George Tenet, referring to the intelligence indicating that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, 21 December 2002
4. "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would to take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." - U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 28 February 2003
5. "There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad" - Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (AKA "Comical Ali," AKA "Baghdad Bob"), 7 April 2003
6. "You go to war with the army you have." - U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 8 December 2004
7. "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." - U.S. President George W. Bush, addressing FEMA coordinator Mike Brown, as the New Orleans levees are failing, 31 August 2005
8. "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." - U.S. Senator John McCain, 15 September 2008 (the day Lehman Brothers collapsed)
9. "All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years." - Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she reads, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, 1 October 2008
10. "This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." - U.S. President Barack H. Obama, describing the Afghan war, 17 August 2009