Donald Rumsfeld will be reunited with his old pal Dick Nixon.
You go to Hell with the Devil you have, not the Devil you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Asked for comment, a spokesdemon for the Prince of Darkness said: “We had hoped to get Dick Cheney first, but as you know, the Lord works in mysterious ways, just like Don.
“Meanwhile, we have an extensive landfill down here — it is Hell, after all — and with a little of his fabled ingenuity I’m sure Don will be able to cobble together some suitable ‘hillbilly armor’ before deploying to the Lake of Fire.”
Tags: Donald Rumsfeld
Mad Blog Media 
June 30, 2021 at 2:27 pm |
So that makes is a known known?
June 30, 2021 at 2:34 pm |
Ever read Rumsfield’s Rules? Dude wrote down every clever saying he ever heard, never stopped to think about whether it really made sense, and packaged them together like it had come down from Mt Sinai. Half of them contradicted the other half, which was totally fine with Don, because the whole point was just to waste the time of his subordinates.
He is know for his “known unknowns” line, which is funny because when he delivered that line, he was actually butchering a briefing he had just received. It comes from basic Intel 101 doctrine, which distinguishes between (1) things you don’t know because you can’t get the data and (2) things you don’t know because the data doesn’t exist. In the case of the first, it’s possible to redirect assets to collect the data to make them knowns, but for the latter, you’re in discovery learning mode and have to play the most likely vs most dangerous game. So Donnie was briefed on the full gamut, couldn’t remember the correct terminology, and dumped the “known unknowns” on the media, who just ate it up.
Lot of that going on back then. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was a term that referred to Oklahoma City-style bombs that had zero tactical significance, and somehow Bush got his his briefings mixed up, and the next thing you know, smart guys like Colin Powell are misusing the term cuz the boss likes the way it sounds. The Bush/Cheney/Rummy era is going to be known for a lot of things, but for me, it’s a cautionary tale about how worthless an MBA is. Everyone in that admin was more worried about sounding smart than being smart.
June 30, 2021 at 2:47 pm |
Those fuckin’ guys. And just think — we had no idea that things could get even worse.
June 30, 2021 at 3:00 pm |
Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of a generation of military deep thinkers who were way more interested in PowerPoint slides than actually knowing what the fuck they were talking about. They would have fit in perfectly on Robert McNamara’s staff. And of course they were bigwigs in the energy and pharm sectors, where a soul or conscience only slows you down.
June 30, 2021 at 3:02 pm |
Speaking of the value of MBA’s and systems analysts, I do recall Robert McNamara’s charts telling us about all that winning we were doing in Vietnam.
June 30, 2021 at 3:10 pm |
Me, I remember talking to a grunt once at the Navajo Hogan, Fort Cartoon dude on his way back to the desert for his third or fourth or fifth tour, I don’t remember which. He had The Look, the fabled Thousand-Yard Stare. We had a short chat about this and that, got along just fine, but that Look, damn.
I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Something good, I hope. He’d clearly seen enough of the other.
June 30, 2021 at 3:23 pm |
Jimmy Carter was a USNA grad, but couldn’t do much about the military’s loyalty to the GOP.
Al Gore and John Kerry were both Vietnam vets, but again, no one in uniform really cared.
James Carville (USMC) and James Webb (USNA/USMC) tried making their cases, but didn’t get anywhere.
So it’s … interesting? funny? ironic? … that Rummy’s “go to war with the army you have” line might have done more to level the playing field between the two political parties than anything else over the last 50 years.
Neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld gave a shit that we were wearing Vietnam-era flak vests when we deployed for OIF/OEF, or that the average Appalachian Trail thru-hiker had more high tech gear than a ’00s era soldier.
“Took a reliable voting bloc, treated them like shit, and then lost their support” seems like a nice thing to put on their tombstones.
June 30, 2021 at 8:19 pm |
You probably got the one I turned in when I went back to the world.
June 30, 2021 at 10:01 pm |
Best part is, we never got new gear because we needed new gear. We got new gear when some congressman’s brother-in-law started making new gear.
July 1, 2021 at 7:02 am |
You could always tell when the SpecOps folks were getting ready to go somewhere because the closest REI store was besieged by them buying stuff that actually worked.
July 1, 2021 at 8:00 am |
Yep. SpecOps got the magic AmEx cards that let them go COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf). Screw the other 98% of the military, let them fight for the scraps.
July 1, 2021 at 7:29 am |
I remember troops and their families wiping out the surplus stores in Bibleburg, and Mountain Chalet, too. Don’t recall if our REI had opened back then.
Could be mistaken, but I seem to recall that a few of the local boyos didn’t even have desert camo duds.
July 1, 2021 at 8:01 am |
I deployed in NATO green. Worked great in the Hürtgen Forest, not so well when you’re surrounded by sand.
June 30, 2021 at 8:16 pm |
Well, Dick would shoot you in the face. The rest would stab you in the back or expect you to catch a bullet for them. That’s all we are good for to them. They had shitty, cloudy water and could never see clearly. And, they stirred it themselves every chance they got.
Well, maybe the dumpster’s CFO is heading to the slammer. You know, Club Fed where the moneyed folks go. Probably not even that.
July 1, 2021 at 2:35 am |
Yep. and on a day when the Taliban are regaining ground. When will the citizens of this country learn that smiling morons that run for political office will sometimes feed us bullshit.
I dropped a 8″ Timber-Lok deck screw in the mail today addressed to the Rumsfeld family to be driven into his coffin. It’s my gift to make sure he doesn’t try to come back from the dead.
Yeah, I’m kidding. I didn’t have the address for the Rumsfeld family so I sent it Dick shoot-em-in-the-back Cheney and asked him to forward it on for me.
July 1, 2021 at 8:38 am |
From the Atlantic:
“Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction. He was worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara, and that is not a competition to judge lightly.”
July 1, 2021 at 8:46 am |
And from Charlie Pierce:
“Rumsfeld was one of the prime architects of the worst foreign policy disaster undertaken by this country since it subbed in for France in Indochina. That’s Line One of the obituary, just as it should be the first line in those that are coming for Powell, and Dick Cheney, and the president that they served.”
July 1, 2021 at 10:53 am |
“You go to hell with the alibis you have. “
July 1, 2021 at 11:11 am |
Here’s a depressing note from Kevin Drum (who, as did Rumsfeld, suffers from multiple myeloma).
It’s a reminder that we here at Ye Olde Dogge Pounde are often out of step with our fellow mutts.
July 1, 2021 at 11:56 am |
Frank talk in front of a microphone will get you miles. Dude was typically cheerful, happy to answer questions, and provided answers that fit on a standard 16″ x 4″ bumper sticker, which is all that the media asks for.
July 1, 2021 at 1:20 pm |
The country gets the government it deserves. I was kinda shocked that our leadership (and followership) wrote off the torture as just another day at the office, with a few low level grunts taking the heat for what was clearly something more than a few bad apples. We pretty much dusted off and recycled the Nuremberg Defense and covered the asses of those responsible, all of which must have left have left folks like Robert H. Jackson spinning in their graves.
I wrote a rather strong letter to Pete Dominici about waterboarding, torture, and Abu Ghraib and signed it as a LANL scientist. That was back when I had a conscience. Never got a reply. Never got fired, either.
July 1, 2021 at 1:41 pm |
Gina Haspel. Extraordinary rendition, Enhanced interrogation techniques. Kidnap, interrogate, torture, and either turn them loose or imprison them at Gitmo for years with no charges. Sets a good example, heh?
July 1, 2021 at 2:33 pm
Yep. Was trying to remember her name. And that low-life lawyer John Yoo who wrote the “torture memos”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/the-torture-memos-10-years-later/252439/
July 1, 2021 at 2:13 pm |
Well, we gotta make new enemies, amirite? Wouldn’t want to run out. Bad for business.