Omniscient Dumbledore (Was Re: Snape's AK Failed!!!, and DADA responses)

[catjaneway]

No: HPFGUIDX 134833

Julie wrote:

> DD pretty much does what will help him achieve his goals,
> period, thus he put Slughorn and more particularly Snape
> *exactly* where he wanted them both, IMO.

Now Janeway:
I'm curious to know why so many folks seem to believe in an all-
knowing, all-powerful Dumbledore (or nearly so), when there's soooo 
much canon pointing to his mistakes. It hardly seems necessary to 
reiterate what they are, as most of them form the plots of the 
previous books: LV!Quirrel, TR!Ginny, Spy!Pettigrew and Innocent!
Sirius, Polyjuice!Barty, and the big reveal of OOP that DD blames 
himself for Sirius death because he didn't trust Harry with the 
truth about the prophecy. You have to do some pretty hard theorizing 
to explain away all of these mistakes (not that I haven't tried!!). 
So it surprises me that many people seem to base their belief in 
Good!Snape wholly or partly on their belief that DD could never make 
a mistake like that.

What's the evidence for an all-but-omniscient Dumbledore? 

(BTW, I don't mean to suggest that Julie thinks that DD is 
omniscient, or that she thinks DD could never have made a mistake 
about Snape. Her post was just a trigger in my mind for this more 
general question.)


Julie again:
> 
> > And it's not like Dumbledore has hired teachers with the most 
> competence, especially in DADA, given that he let that dimwit
> Lockheart teach DADA one year. And Quirrell didn't seem all
> that great either (certainly Umbridge wasn't though DD had 
> nothing to do with that).

Janeway again:
Julie, first thanks for reading and replying thoughtfully to my 
excessively long post! Second, aren't you trying to have it both 
ways here? DD does just what will help him achieve his goals, but he 
sometimes hires incompetent teachers? I guess one could argue that 
hiring incompetent teachers *did* help him achieve his goals in 
these particular cases, or that the incompetent teachers at least 
didn't *prevent* him from achieving his goals. I think it makes more 
sense to recognize that DD has the normal limitations of a 
headmaster in finding good teachers and sometimes has to make 
compromises.

JMO,
Janeway