For the umpteenth time in the past three years, everybody's jumping on the bandwagon aimed at Donald "Tuff Shit" Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Offense.
Don't you get it? The Dumbocrats see him as the easiest target; the Repoobs see him as an embarrassment. The fact is that Rummy was hired to carry out the core military policies of PNAC and the Doubleduh-Cheney Gang, i.e. fight wars cheaply, make the military unattractive to all but the hardest-core Rambo wannabes, develop as many high-tech meta-weapons as possible (seen the DARPA site lately?), encourage privatization of ALL military functions (including soldiering).
None of this stuff was created by Rummy ('tho he absolutely LOVES it). So we fire the stupid SOB - what then? My point, of course, is that we can change all the faces, but the dicks are still there.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."