Oh, fuck.

Can we have Rummy back? He's only stupid and evil.

(This feels almost like Christmas though.)

Every link that I've followed goes to a 404 error.

There is no record of any article that quotes Rumsfeld that I could find.

Apparently, the ministry of truth has been revising history the last few years...

Gates is Poppa Bush's man on the spot, gotta be. The Texas mafia is going to do their best to bail Junior out yet again.

Look on the bright side -- he didn't name Lieberman as the new SecDef.

Hmm... President Cheney? I don't know if that's actually good news. Can we get rid of both them at once and have President Pelosi instead?

And what do you mean by "a 25th Amendment removal"? Doesn't the 25th just specify succession?

Texas Monthly just did a feature on Gates for this month's issue, for anyone who's curious about what he's been up to since leaving the CIA.

I think that was a letter, not an article. If you google the entire string, it shows up in two other places than Electrolite.

But if you google just Rummy's remark - it's repeated a lot.

the original story is linked to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25077-2003Jan7.html.

Someone said they looked for a transcript of the conference and found them at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/t01072003_t0107sd.html

Oh, wait, atrios has a copy of the transcription here http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_01_05_atrios_archive.html#90153423

The washington post and dod links are dead, though.

Though last week, when Bush made his "Rumsfeld is doing a heckuva job" statement, someone in my household muttered, "How long you think he's got?"

Thousands of lives lost in a screwed-up, unnecessary war -- not failure

Losing an election -- failure

John Meltzer, where did you get that story? Say on.

Suzanne M, I envy you. My birthday is tomorrow. Although it would be nice, I don't think any evil men will resign for me.

But, here's hoping. *fingers crossed*

(Looking back on what I just wrote, I have the image in my head of Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Doctor Strangelove. Now, who could I put in his place?)

http://www.poe-news.com/features.php?feat=31845

Bush is no more capable of resigning than a rat is of throwing up.

02NOV06:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency, extending a job guarantee to two of the most-criticized members of his team.

08NOV06:

Bush said while Rumsfeld's resignation had been in the works for a period of time, he held off any announcement until Wednesday because he "didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days" of the election campaign.

Does he think we're stupid? The "period of time" started when the results started coming in last night, particularly how the vote was going in towns that held military bases.

I go back to the scene in Homicide: Life on the Street where they are interviewing a smart-ass suspect who is making one outrageous, inconsistent alibi after another. "If you're going to lie to me kid," says a detective, "lie with respect."

Somehow, because they can't vomit, it killed them (I'm guessing it has a mild toxicity, and that the small size of the rodents made it lethal).

The nice effect was that, should a child find it, and eat it, they just puked. A bit of negative reinforcement, and no harm done.

TK

Holy cow. And the sun is shining, too. (At least in San Francisco.)

Also in Illinois.

And there was a transit of Mercury today.

At lunch I went down to the Scitech museum in downtown Aurora. They have a solar telescope on the roof.

Mercury was hitting the disk just as I arrived. The Sun was about three feet across on the projection table. Mercury was the size of a small pea. It was upstaged by a nearby sunspot, but that just added to the fun.

Now they get to pretend that they are listening to the will of the American public, making a change, setting a new course, blah blah. Everything that was wrong until now was Rummy's fault, of course, and they can pretend things will go better from here. And since he'll be out of office, no-one will bother to investigate him or try to hold him accountable for things that went wrong.

So, when's Rummy's flight to the Hague?

http://www.thismodernworld.com/3315

And to the earlier commenter who suggested that more media oddities might make it seem like we'd stepped into the twilight zone --- ummm, I'm not sure when exactly that happened, but it has to have been sometime before Powell peddled his packet of lies to the Security Council, and no one (aside from Hans Blix) publicly called him on it...

Best damned analogy I've seen of this election. Can I borrow your bat? Got a few spare dings around here. :-)

...I get the feeling that over the last few weeks, he really has stopped listening to everyone except Laura and Barney.

Would that be Barney the Dinosaur?

Hey, now!

If the U.S. won't deal, the world apparently will:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1557842,00.html

Rumsfeld may yet have to face up to taking responsibility for his recent work.

Particularly sweet snippits:
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that one of the witnesses who will testify on their behalf is former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq.

Rumsfeld's resignation, they say, means that the former Defense Secretary will lose the legal immunity usually accorded high government officials

I'm heartened by the names on the list of the accused. And I'm glad that somebody somewhere is willing to stand up and say, "If you will not deal with this yourselves, we will"--although I would, of course, prefer that my own country pull its head out of its rump and clean up its own act.

"He's a ruthless little bastard, you can be sure of that," President Nixon had said of Rumsfeld, a remark captured in 1971 on the White House's hidden taping system.