Rachel Maddow had a segment on her show last week describing how Rumsfeld bought and lived in the house where Frederick Douglass was enslaved to be broken spiritually. As Maddow asked - who would want to live in that house?
I don't have a lot of good things to say about the Bush administration, but even that whole post-9/11 saga seems tamed compared to today.
Yeah what has happened during the Trump era can almost make one nostalgic for at least some aspects of the Bush 43 government.
Donald Rumsfeld, though, after two separate stints at the Pentagon, and very unlike Robert McNamara, never copped to personally having made errors or taken decisions that ravaged the lives of erstwhile bystanders to conflicts in which the USA involved itself. And he was a past master at obfuscation.
I usually try to refrain from saying anything unkind about the dead, but I'm having trouble there in the case of Rumsfeld's passing. Best I could manage on a trial basis ran something like "The post of US Secretary of Defense is always a very tough job". I tried that one out and decided I'd best just shut up. It hasn't taken me long though to decide that a decent interval of silence is over already.
Honestly maybe we should have lobbed a few cruise missiles in the general direction of Afghanistan (since we weren't going to bomb the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) after 9/11 and called it a warning but let it go at that. No one could bring back three thousand dead American civilians... and what transpired after our initial response has ended up producing a total of many many hundreds of thousands if not over a million Afghan and Iraqi deaths. Not to mention the blood and treasure of American families.
Anyway somewhere in there was opportunity for a DoD secretary to stand up and say ya know if you do that (whatever was proposed next by either admin officials or its generals) then I will resign in a manner your entire administration and military leadership will come to regret more than you'll regret doing what you now propose. But no. And his whole thing about trimming down the military while acceding to fighting those wars was unforgivable. Who does not remember the lack of even basic clothing items for guys shipped to Iraq? And the lack of reinforced vehicles once it became clear that IEDS would become a daily danger...
Rumsfeld: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
WTF. Not an elective war pushed for by a bunch of obsessed neocons without a justifiable reason so a bunch of lies instead. No.
I realize I was initially at least kinder to the ghost of Antonin Scalia for longer than I'm being to the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld. So be it.