It’s an old National Lampoon gag, originally concerning Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but it seems appropriate in this instance. Robert McNamara was the Donald Rumsfeld of his generation, a whiz kid who was too smart for his own good (and ours).

Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones notes that Salon.com founder David Talbot wrote a 1984 cover story for the magazine on “the transformation of McNamara, former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and ex-CIA chief William Colby from Vietnam-era hawks to advocates of a nuclear weapons freeze.”

Talbot, Schulman said, described McNamara as “the cost-control wizard who thought the war could be run like a Ford assembly line: body counts, kill ratios, bombing raids. And when he saw that it wasn’t adding up, that it did not compute, he repeatedly lied — to Congress, to the press, to the American public.”

What a shame Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around to piss a quart of filtered Wild Turkey on this warmonger’s grave, the way he did on a ceremony for the unveiling of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s portrait at the University of Georgia Law School (see “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” from “The Great Shark Hunt”).

“They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels,” Thompson wrote.

In his absence, we have war correspondent Joe Galloway, author of “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” who seems pleased that “the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell” and eulogizes him as a serial liar, a distorter of history and “the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”

Here’s hoping Bob, Dick and LBJ save Don a seat by the fire — or better yet, in it, since it seems that unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld will never have any fleeting doubts about the countless graves he has filled, with our people and theirs.

Oh, yeah. There was a bike race today, too. Somebody won. Nobody died.