Rum Ending
There is one overriding, overarching reason that Rumsfeld was "allowed" to resign yesterday (after having claimed to do so on several occasions in the past). It's about the sweeping Democratic congressional victory - not the reasons for it and the glaring reasons to change course on virtually everything.
It's the testimony. Executive branch leaders like Rummy are going to be frog-marched down to Congress and forced to answer the questions they should have been asked years ago. And Rummy's not up to it.
No, that's unfair to the monster. Rummy could sit there and be as pugnacious and offensively glib as he's always been. It's just that pretty soon it's going to matter what he says. When he gives the crafted or crackpot answer to very serious questions, the contempt charges, the subpoenas, and impeachments will appear where they haven't in the past.
Remember when Arlen Spectre said the Torture Bill would set justice back 900 years - and then voted for it? Guess what? Not any longer.
Rummy has been the most radical and least competent Defense/War Secretary in memory - certainly in this century or the last. He has been the one rejecting the pleas of the uniformed military. He's the one who set and maintained an ineffectively light force in Iraq. He set the program of torture in motion - and protected it to the point of making it legal. He rejected the Geneva Conventions.
And he promoted incompetent loyalists over brilliant American military officers. For everything he's done to wreck the once-great US military, that might be the most damaging. Sure, he put them in a fight they can't win without the means to do anything but lose slowly. But he also took out all the innovators, all the bright officers who could see his grotesque incompetence, and replaced them with yes-men. Yes-men are poison to an army.
Rumsfeld was the deluded neocon living in a make-believe world - but leading real soldiers to kill and be killed. He is a deluded ideologue who simply does not care how much blood is spilled for his warped ideas - as long as it's not his own.
For Canada, this is great news. Now there is at least a chance that the Afghan campaign will be run on an effort to win, and not an effort of effect domestic American politics. That's a stretch because Georgie is still the Moron-in-Chief, but you never know.
Without Rumsfeld, we may, for the first time, fight to win.
It's the testimony. Executive branch leaders like Rummy are going to be frog-marched down to Congress and forced to answer the questions they should have been asked years ago. And Rummy's not up to it.
No, that's unfair to the monster. Rummy could sit there and be as pugnacious and offensively glib as he's always been. It's just that pretty soon it's going to matter what he says. When he gives the crafted or crackpot answer to very serious questions, the contempt charges, the subpoenas, and impeachments will appear where they haven't in the past.
Remember when Arlen Spectre said the Torture Bill would set justice back 900 years - and then voted for it? Guess what? Not any longer.
Rummy has been the most radical and least competent Defense/War Secretary in memory - certainly in this century or the last. He has been the one rejecting the pleas of the uniformed military. He's the one who set and maintained an ineffectively light force in Iraq. He set the program of torture in motion - and protected it to the point of making it legal. He rejected the Geneva Conventions.
And he promoted incompetent loyalists over brilliant American military officers. For everything he's done to wreck the once-great US military, that might be the most damaging. Sure, he put them in a fight they can't win without the means to do anything but lose slowly. But he also took out all the innovators, all the bright officers who could see his grotesque incompetence, and replaced them with yes-men. Yes-men are poison to an army.
Rumsfeld was the deluded neocon living in a make-believe world - but leading real soldiers to kill and be killed. He is a deluded ideologue who simply does not care how much blood is spilled for his warped ideas - as long as it's not his own.
For Canada, this is great news. Now there is at least a chance that the Afghan campaign will be run on an effort to win, and not an effort of effect domestic American politics. That's a stretch because Georgie is still the Moron-in-Chief, but you never know.
Without Rumsfeld, we may, for the first time, fight to win.
posted by fiduciary at 7:52 AM
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