Donald Rumsfeld -- Thrown Under the Bus

He has a face made to be struck with a shovel. His teeth have been honed on the necks of babies. There are no eyes behind his eyeglasses. Stick your hand into his chest and you're likely to pull out an electric eel or a hunk of undigested gristle from the body of a puppy.

He's Donald Rumsfeld and he personifies the banality of evil.

The fact of Donald Rumsfeld's existence is proof-positive that "Intelligent Design" does not exist. The creation of Donald Rumsfeld arose from the confluence of the same uncountable random events that place a chicken bone in the throat of a choking man.

Having never earned an honest dollar in his life, nor thinking an honest thought, nor doing an honest deed, Rumsfeld brought decades of despotic dispassion from the corporate world into the realm of politics, where he could more effectively destroy the lives of human beings. Cost-cutting meaures that sent workers to unemployment lines just didn't do it for him anymore. It was shameful, but bloodless. To satisfy the blackhole within him, Rumsfeld needed to feel the damp, dead weight of steaming entrails in his hands.

His strategy for the war in Iraq was predicated on one best-case-scenario piled onto another, cemented together by miracles, good luck, and a level of hubris that would have made the ancient Greeks shiver in their sandals. Rumsfeld's joining of corporate vampirism with civilian-wrought military tactics is enough to make the devil himself blush.

I honestly believe that the war in Iraq is going exactly as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush desire. Bloodshed, misery, shattered lives, exploded homes are remote, academic, non-reverberating events to these three. I've read that even when in fine health, Cheney had to gaze at color photographs of mutilated fetuses for more than a quarter of an hour just to achieve the semblance of an erection.

The worst part of Rumsfeld being thrown under the bus is having to hear all the phoney, fictional tributes to the great bravery he showed from behind his desk in the Pentagon; the gallantry he displayed among pampered, bloated millionaires and sycophants.

Goddamn you, Donald Rumsfeld. History will remember you as a collector of skulls; gargoyle, corpse chewer, grave maker, destroyer, and poet laureate of neoconservatives:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Glass Box
You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession
Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.

—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The Digital Revolution
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!

A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!

—June 9, 2001, following European trip

The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity
I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing