Donald Rumsfeld is not having a good book tour outside of the DC bubble. Following the sheltered days in the Bush administration, but perhaps still exhibiting the cockiness from not believing he ever was, Rumsfeld is finding his book to be asking more questions about his past than answering them. One question posed about his past that remains to be answered was posed by comedian Louis CK: "Are you a lizard?"
Ray Gustini of the Atlantic Wire has a good rundown of the stumbles in Rumsfeld's book tour (and he's not even listing Andrea Mitchell's hammering of him earlier this week). Rumsfeld's defense, honed from an arrogance and elitism from being a career politician, was a simple denial to any charge laid out against him. You can almost feel the disappointment from every interviewer hoping to get a story, and the conservative bloggers have begun to glow in response.
So if you got a chance to talk to Rumsfeld, you could call him a war criminal and he would walk off the set or hang up on you. But if you were Louis CK on the Opie and Anthony Show on Thursday, you could accuse him of being a flesh eating lizard from outer space, and you would get...a change of subject. Louis nails him time and again for not answering a simple denial to what would seem to be an obvious question, and the results are hilarious. It also shines a light on how sad a life Rumsfeld leads, as when he says that he is so popular somebody bought him dinner once.
Taking the logic to absurd extremes, while tenaciously holding to his premise, Louis CK mocks Rumsfeld while "innocently" asking what it was like to shake hands with Saddam Hussein, who was "hung in a badly lit room". Whenever he thinks Rumsfeld strays too far into serious territory, or promotes his book too much, Louis goes back to the lizard premise and smacks him with the absurd. If the chance for a comedian to get some kind of confession out of Rumsfeld is far fetched, he might as well sidetrack his whole attempt to sell a book based on the credibility that no one thinks he has.
(video is nsfw)