Gerald Ford's chief of staff Don Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy Dick Cheney, 1975. Photo by Harvey Georges/AP, via The New York Times.
In defense of that vile reprobate Donald Rumsfeld, now on his final journey to
whichever circle of Hell it is that houses those who believe their own
parochial interests outweigh the suffering of millions, it is not at all true
that he spoke incomprehensible gobbledygook in the way Sarah Jones suggests in
her otherwise excellent farewell note in
New York:
Iraq will be Rumsfeld’s legacy, with all of the lies, all of the torture,
all of the killing. While many hands bear responsibility for such loss, two
belonged to Rumsfeld, who had Saddam Hussein in his sights for years before
9/11 gave him the excuse he’d wanted to attack Iraq. Rumsfeld lived out the
rest of his days with his impunity. His victims weren’t so lucky.
The great filmmaker Errol Morris has a new film, to be released April 4, The Unknown Known, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, contrasting I guess his sublime psychopathy with the confused guilt of Robert McNamara captured in The Fog of War. His series of articles on Rumsfeld and the film, "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld", is just starting in the Times, and I wanted to single out this bit from an interview with NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, the reporter who asked Rumsfeld the question that led to the famous "unknown unknowns" remark:
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, not just [Rumsfeld] but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith — don’t get me started on Doug Feith — told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.
"Dumbest fucking guy on the planet" according to General Tommy Franks (no slouch in the dumb department himself). But as with Rumsfeld—and George W. Bush himself—the stupidity is a kind of act, masking the operative feature of total pathological irresponsibility.Via HuffingtonPost.
Fellow dirt miner Driftglass has been visiting the same places as me again, and has more to say, essential as usual.
Deriding President Barack Obama as the weakest president "in my adult lifetime," former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on the White House on Tuesday to fish or cut bait in Syria.
Rumsfeld said there could be no middle ground in Syria: "You either ought to change the regime, or you ought to do nothing," he said during a question-and-answer session after a lecture at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich.
"In his adult lifetime" would exclude the not notably weak presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman; he reached 21 in the first year of Eisenhower's [jump]
Four years ago, candidate Obama spoke to the scale of the times. Today,
he shrinks from it, trying instead to distract our attention from the
biggest issues to the smallest—from characters on Sesame Street and
silly word games to misdirected personal attacks he knows are false.
I.e., Big Bird and word games are the big issues, personal attacks are the small ones. Or it it the other way around? He's the one who brought up Big Bird, he must have thought it was important at the time. Then again most of the misdirected personal attacks Obama knows are false are directed against Obama, aren't they?
A lie in this speech I hadn't seen before, about
the college student, graduating this spring, with 10 to 20 thousand
dollars in student debt, who now learns that she also will be paying for
50 thousand dollars in government debt, a burden that will put the
American Dream beyond her reach.
Obama's going to make us all pay our share of the national debt?
From MIT, Gangnam style in one of its funnier versions, with an appearance by Professor Noam Chomsky (at 3:20)totally stealing the show, via Language Log.
It's the first snowflake of the season!
@rumsfeldofficeHey Uncle Donald don't judge government bureaucracies by what happened when you ran them.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 31, 2012
The assistant secretary tried to defend herself, but there were too many of them. From The Fun Times Guide.
A wonderful device by Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein, Romney's Revenue Meter, allows you to play games with Romney's tax cut numbers, instantly working out how you could make them work out by eliminating this or that deduction or tax expenditure or adding this or that tax, though not of course by doing anything Romney says he's prepared to do. Of no use in arguing with the proverbial obnoxious brother-in-law (for the record, I have three brothers-in-law and not one of them would vote for Romney)—he would just deny the assumptions.
The Heritage Foundation discovered a flaw in the logic behind wind energy: turns out that the wind doesn't always blow.
Happy Halloween! On West End Avenue, I just saw a mom in "binders full of women" costume. It was nowhere near as fancy as these Ohio ladies, but a pleasant sight all the same.
