A piece of excrement has written a book. Well, sure the pages are full of shit, what do you expect when a piece of excrement has written a book?
Book review: 'Known and Unknown' by Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld has served as White House chief of staff and twice as secretary of Defense, the youngest and the oldest man ever to hold the post. He has been a trusted diplomatic envoy and successful private sector executive. Throughout it all — indeed, for most of his 78 years — he has borne with courage and almost preternatural fortitude the burden of always being the smartest guy in the room.
bolding brought to you by Gags R Us
Now that is how you begin a book review when the writer of said book is a piece of shit. Tim Rutten at the LA Times has something to say. Let's go find out what that might be. (Oh, and all bolding below is courtesy of moi. Cause there is gonna be a lot.)
It's wearisome always being right, particularly when so many others are so wrong, so often — at least that's the impression a reader is most likely to draw from Rumsfeld's exhaustive, exasperating but vigorously written memoir, "Known and Unknown."
The title derives from a frequently parodied Rumsfeld response to a reporter's question about whether there actually was evidence of any link between Saddam Hussein and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. The Defense secretary responded: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because, 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."
Yet, what about the unknown knowns? The ones Rummy conveniently forgot to tell the world while he and the Bush administration were lying like a mf'er in the lead up to their War for Oil?
It is, of course, a logical fallacy to multiply categories beyond necessity, but it's one Rumsfeld has rhetorically mastered to create a self-conscious reputation as a fearless questioner of received truths, one he's amplified with a flair for impenetrably gnomic aphorisms. That, plus a cloying — but purely verbal — deference to questions of institutional loyalty are calculated to conceal as knife-sharp a set of elbows as any accomplished bureaucrat ever swung.
Perhaps it is more of an illogical fantasy as much as a logical fallacy? Both lead to the same place, in the end. More bullshit.
One might suppose, for example, that the "unknown" Rumsfeld intended to explore in these memoirs would be unrevealed facts about the six years during which he ran the Defense Department for President George W. Bush — particularly since nearly two-thirds of the book deal with that relatively brief period in the author's life. But, as Rumsfeld writes, he's "never much of a handwringer, I don't spend a lot of time in recriminations, looking back or second-guessing decisions made in real time with imperfect information by myself or others." As seems typical of so much here, that's partially true; the author has no taste for self-criticism or second-guessing himself.
Partially true is about the best one could say about old Someone-Else's-Blood-and-Guts Rumsfeld.
big snip
While the author goes out of the way to stress his loyalty to Bush and to express admiration for his personal qualities, he employs his best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone to describe a president who too often failed to demand the best information, made decisions precipitously and then failed to see that they were wholly carried out.
The one colleague who is spared Rumsfeld's disapproval is Vice President Dick Cheney, with whom he served in Gerald Ford's White House. Apart from the observation that Cheney almost surely was the most influential vice president in recent history, he hardly appears in these pages. It's an odd omission.
Ultimately, Rumsfeld casts his net over a herd of scapegoats large enough to include his own family. He attributes his preoccupation in the days preceding 9/11, for example, to worry over his son Nic's relapse into drug addiction. His flippant, controversial dismissal of concerns over the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum was, similarly, the consequence of distraction over his wife's ruptured appendix.
Kid is into drugs? Kill hundreds of thousands of brown people! Wife's appendix has the audacity to rupture? Send American's to their deaths defending those oil fields that you perceive to be yours, just like Daffy Duck rubbing his greedy hands (wings?) together and chanting "Mine, Mine, Mine!"
A piece of excrement wrote a book. Another day, another dollar. Or so.