Friday, May 07, 2004
Rumsfeld holds the line
Surprise, surprise: the Bush is Bad News, which obtuse left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall hilariously calls a moderate & middle of the road newspaper, is today squealing for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.
Having erected or jumped on every Bush bash bandwagon in recent memory the folk at the B is BN are goggle-eyed at the specter of return on investment : "The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened." So says their editorialist (on behalf of the world).
The contortions of this short piece remind me of the way Vincent Price reads the dialogue in the old Alice Cooper hit song "The Black Widow", pretending a level tone at the beginning of an indefensibly grotesque monologue, then gradually deteriorating into a beastly and frothing I-told-you-so-I-was-right-I-... ruuuuuuuuuule-the-wooooooooorld ... explosion by the end.
Actually, the rule with beasts is: don't feed them.
Sometimes it can be tempting, and President Bush (and Rumsfeld before the so-called 9/11 Commission) succumbed to that temptation by proferring apologies. But the taste of blood has only incited the animals to stammer for more. No benefit, it is now quite obvious, will accrue to his presidency or Iraq-rebuilding efforts from caving in to that blood-lust.
When O'Neill departed Treasury the general perception was that the economy might fare better with a different custodian, as it has, but the same cannot be said with regard to Rumsfeld at Defence.
