Donald Rumsfeld
I thought your comment was well written and sounded much as you do on similar subjects, but the e-mail address did not work and so I deleted your comment. Try again.
By the way, I am still puzzled by the response you gave me a couple of years back concerning Army logistics in the new organization. pl
Col.,
This is very intriguing.
No way you could bend the rules a little and reproduce the comment for posterity’s sake?
Or do you not think it was truly a communication from Rummy?
Donald Rumsfield
Email: Donald@wemakereality.gov
Comment:
It seems to me that all of you are in a blame America first mode mentioning things like the Kurdistan rejection of the Iraqi flag and Sistani’s retreat from politically life without a single mention of Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the global war on terror.
With examples like these, I do worry about the lack of perspective in our national dialogue — a perspective that would make us all much happier.
We are again engaged in conflicts that are testing whether we believe that the defense of liberty is worth the cost. And again, there are those who disagree with the mission, who question whether it is worth the sacrifice. To make things perfectly clear our mission is the defence of liberty and since you refuse to make the sacrifice you are appeasers who would ridicule and ignore anyone who warned against the rise of fascism, Nazism, Communism and the Democratic party.
I would like to raise several questions to guide us during this struggle against violent extremists:
1- Is there any way the Republicans can keep our control of Congress and more importantly mantaining the dominance of this administration among Republicans?
2- Can we do by dividing reality into the double plus good and the double plus ungood thus establishing that to think any un ungood can come from the ungood is ungood? That when pretending to be un ungood they are really being un un ungood which is more ungood than ungood?
Can we convince the base that this is a sophisticated and complex view of reality which requires us to abandon limited tools such as police work, intelligence in several of it’s meanings, diplomacy in all it’s richness, economic pressures and military action as an art and well planned enterprise and reciognize that these are fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches which are bombast and military campaigns planned by Rush Limbaugh?
I believe we must.
– Donald Rumsfeld SOD.
I feel like I just had a conversation with Carroll’s Red Queen.
Mr Lang,
You have probably already done this, but just in case, I did an IP Lookup:
205.178.43.245
OrgName: RCN Corporation
Address: 196 Van Buren St.
City: Herndon
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20170
Country: US
Comment: For all abuse issues, please contact abuse@rcn.com
RegDate:
Updated: 2006-02-23
OrgID: RCN
Address: 196 Van Buren St.
City: Herndon
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20170
Country: US
NetRange: 205.178.0.0 – 205.178.127.255
CIDR: 205.178.0.0/17
NetName: RCN-BLK-18
NetHandle: NET-205-178-0-0-1
Parent: NET-205-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: AUTH1.DNS.RCN.NET
NameServer: AUTH2.DNS.RCN.NET
NameServer: AUTH3.DNS.RCN.NET
NameServer: AUTH4.DNS.RCN.NET
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate:
A man of many talents, that Mr. Rumsfeld. He is also a poet too – here are some nuggets, compiled bt Hart Seely at Slate…
Rumsfeld’s poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld’s gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O’Hara’s.
The Unknown
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.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.
It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing
http://www.slate.com/id/2081042
Oh my, this posting from Mr. Rumsfeld has shamed me into disposing of my Barbara Streisand collection. People schmeople. I recant from all subversive activity. Brilliant! I had to compose myself after reading this. Exceptional, Col.!
Wow, that smells funny. Having written some bogus company memos I think it’s over the top, heavy handed and out of character. I’d guess the actual author is less than a third of Donald Rumsfeld’s age. Medal of Honor, appeazers, political party affiliation, Limbaugh…. it’s seems like a lot of window dressing. I’m not an intellectual but it sounded like gibberish.
one of the most beautiful compositions i’ve read this year, definitely worthy of the wordsmith that mr. rumsfeld accidentally occasionally becomes.
thanks for sharing.
Col.,
Yes, thank you for going ahead and posting the comment.
On the one hand this does seem to be the sort of mumbo jumbo that we have come to recognize as classic Rummy.
On the other hand the email address that was selected (albeit bogus) certainly could be interpreted as being exceedingly Orwellian; though I suspect that it may have been intended in more of a “will to power” kind of way.
Either way, I can’t help but find it a little unsettling.
RCN Corporation is just the company that provides his internet connection. According to geobytes, “Rummy” is from San Jose, CA.
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm