You've done a heck of a job, Rummy

No, I say it because I fondly remember our times together.

 

Chased from where?

 

France.

 

You folks just aren't getting it. The point is that we should ask the country what it can't do for us, not what another country can do for them. Also, it's time for Mr. Bush to whitewash the fence. Wait, maybe that was Tom Sawyer.

Also, there are known knowns...

God bless Halliburton

Sincerely,

Donald Rumsfeld

 

I understand Celine, but what's wrong with Shania?

 

I'm a rightie and I think Limbaugh is a gasbag. So is Olbermann.

And Canada isn't a bad country, but there are a significant number of smug, self-righteous, lecturing, nose-in-the-air, superior-acting elitists who live there, including one whose initials are J.R.

 

When does Rummy get his medal?

 

Jeffrey Simpson, conservative columnist in today's Globe & Mail.


--------------------------------------------------------

Donald Rumsfeld will go down as one of the most controversial U.S. secretaries of defence, and one of the least successful.

When Mr. Rumsfeld resigned yesterday, he had a few admirers but legions of detractors, largely, but not exclusively, for prosecuting an Iraq war gone horribly wrong.

Almost everything he had predicted in Iraq didn't happen, except for the easy toppling of Saddam Hussein. A war that seemed so seductively easy has turned into a quagmire.

Mr. Rumsfeld thought Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators. He rebuffed suggestions that the United States needed more troops to occupy the country after Mr. Hussein fell.

He scorned traditional U.S. allies, preferring a "coalition of the willing."

He kept praising the improved performance of the Iraqi military, a claim almost all independent observers debunked.

He said many times that the insurgency was on its last legs, whereas it evolved into a nasty, low-level civil war from which no easy escape beckons.

Instead of clearing Iraq of terrorists, the war produced more.

No matter how dire things became in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld insisted on seeing progress. He became a laughingstock of late-night comics with statements such as this one in late 2003: "I feel that the progress in four or five months is breathtaking." At about the same time, he declared the insurgency was only being kept alive by "pockets of dead-enders." With characteristic confidence, he told Europeans: "We are right, and you are both wrong and ignorant about the threat presented by Iraq."

This widening disconnect between Mr. Rumsfeld's assertions and what Americans saw on their television screens eroded his credibility. Many Democrats had been calling predictably for his resignation. So did a few Republicans in the midterms. He had become politically toxic. He had to go, especially as Mr. Bush casts about with increasing desperation for some new strategy.

Various congressional committees, with Democrats in the majority, will likely want to investigate the planning and execution of the war. The prospect of defending himself for two years before a hostile Congress was more than Mr. Rumsfeld could bear.

Somebody had to be the fall guy, politically speaking, for the whacking Americans gave Mr. Bush on Tuesday. Since the President and Vice-President Dick Cheney could not be removed, except by impeachment, Mr. Rumsfeld got the chop as the third most powerful man in Washington.

Like Robert McNamara, president Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defence during the Vietnam War, Mr. Rumsfeld was always enamoured of his own brilliance. He had the answers. Others would listen to him, especially generals. He was a Washington insider, having served in president Richard Nixon's administration, but also a successful company president.

Like Mr. McNamara, he loved systems, controls, plans, all implemented in minute detail. When the plans failed, Mr. Rumsfeld remained wedded to them, because he had conceived them.

Mr. Rumsfeld pushed aside the advice of generals, steamrollered secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, dazzled (for a while) a compliant Washington press corps, and formed an iron link with Mr. Cheney, such that the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis dominated U.S. foreign policy.

The two had worked together in the Nixon administration, and remained fast friends and ideological soulmates. When an inexperienced Mr. Bush became President, he asked Mr. Rumsfeld to become Secretary of Defence.

Very quickly, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney put key operatives in most of the administration's key positions, including under Mr. Powell at the State Department. Along with Paul Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, and a cadre of Cheney loyalists, a small group drove U.S. foreign policy during the "war on terror."

The group built the case for the Iraq war, authorized the use of torture, curtailed civil liberties, rejected multilateralism as a policy for wimps, and, fatefully, took control of U.S. policy toward Iraq, shouldering aside the State Department.

They even manipulated the Central Intelligence Agency. When they disagreed with the CIA's findings, they created their own intelligence-assessment unit to produce more palatable findings for Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney.

They used the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq, dismissing the importance of United Nations approval, scoffing at reports from United Nations weapons inspectors, insisting all along that Mr. Hussein had links with terrorist groups, that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and, if left alone, would possess more.

Even before 9/11, Mr. Rumsfeld was fighting his own department. He was convinced the U.S. military should become a different kind of fighting force, less reliant on large numbers than high technology. He butted heads with many senior military officers, treating many of them with disdain. Some, upon retirement, spoke scathingly about his arrogance, strategic blunders and tactical ineptitude.

The Iraq war will forever shape Mr. Rumsfeld's reputation as a principal instigator and executor of a disastrous strategy about which the American people spoke on Tuesday.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Pretty much bang-on.

 

The Bob and Doug Mackenzie comment, however, shall stand ....

 

Well-stroked, sir. That was terrific.

 

JR, why do you hate America?





Wait. Nevermind...

 

Slappy, I love America.

I love Americans. (Well, most)

I love travelling in the USA. New York is my favourite city in North America.

My best holiday ever was an 8 week cross country road trip from Toronto to California and back again.

However, Fredo & His Gang, not so much.

That said, I didn't like Bush when he was governor of Texas. It's not a new thing.