Donald Rumsfeld: Your Padded Cell Is Ready
Of all the despicable clowns assembled in the Bush administration, my pick for “Most likely to leave in a straitjacket” is Donald Rumsfeld. Sure, he might skate through the last three years but I wouldn’t hold off getting the jacket size. This guy has been turning out wacky statements for years including the famous “Knowns we know about and unkown unknowns we don’t know about.” Then there’s that business about not having a chair in his office and always standing up. Actually, forget the quirks - just based on his failure to plan post-invasion Iraq you'd figure he'd be gone by now, and yet he remains.
One reason the old guy still holds on in Washington is that he is a fierce protector of bureaucratic turf, and has a real focus on his own future. He even flew to Iraq during one particularly tense time with his job approval rating, to reassure the troops that he is a survivor. Nice of him to consider himself at a time like that. Then he left these young people in the wretched mess he helped create, and hopped a plane back to the States. So he's a self-absorbed eccentric power-junkie. Has anything changed?
What leads me to believe Rumsfeld has finally gone cuckoo for cocoa puffs, is his recent quotes about al-Qaeda and how they’re outdoing us in the propaganda wars. According to Donald, they’ve “skillfully adapted” to modern media, and there is a “dangerous deficiency” in our ability to spin the world. (Does that remind anybody of the Mind Shaft Gap in Dr. Strangelove?)
So that’s it! The problem isn’t that we adopted a policy of torture, and the world found out about it. No, the problem is that Muslim extremists are using the pictures. We just need a bigger spin machine to counteract this and everything will be all right.
As usual, it couldn’t be his fault or the rest of Bush’s foreign policy team. No way. We just need to give Halliburton a 10 billion dollar contract to tell the world how wonderful we are, and these pictures of the bodies of torture victims won’t have any impact.
Personally, I’m guessing Rumsfeld will need a size 44. Maybe a 46. he does have quite a build, left over from when he learned about running a war by wrestling in college. Still, we want the straitjacket to fit tightly though, in case the crazy bastard tries to escape.
posted by Bill McDonald @ 10:17 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Rumsfeld is a "self-absorbed, eccentric power junkie" because he went back to Washington where his office is instead of staying in Iraq indefinitely?
I don't know what he might have meant by "modern media" but Arabs have been playing the Western media like a fiddle since the 1950s at least.
But how hard is that? We may be up against an astonishingly ruthless enemy whose stock in trade is war crimes and nothing but war crimes, but does each new outrage get noted duly by the press for what it is? Does the news of it inspire a reaction of outrage, fury and determination? No, it's treated like unpleasant weather—undesireable, but totally understandable. But let U.S. or British troops—who are themselves the target of ceaseless atrocities—get out of line and it will make gripping copy for YEARS.
The self-absorbed part was making his speech to the troops about him and how he is a survivor, when they could lose their lives and he's just playing Washington Insider.
The crazy part to me was that Rumsfeld believes a better propaganda machine will help sway the Arab world, despite pictures of torture and carnage from Iraq. I think he's doing the typical Potomac side-step: Deflecting the reason for his failure to another problem, rather than face the true results that our policy of torture has produced in the Middle East.
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