Rumsfeld is "Catching Snowflakes" on Countdown
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Download | play (h/t Heather)
The Washington Post came out this week with a report on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bizarre methodology to communicate with underlings at the Pentagon.
Obviously a big believer in the "trickle down" theory, Rummy would issue forth 20 to 60 memos daily, quaintly dubbed "snowflakes", perhaps in an attempt to de-emphasize the avalanche of paper coming out of his office.
There aren't any shocking new revelations, per se, but we do get a sense of an intolerant man with unusually thin skin.[..]
One of the more notable points from the WaPo article is that Rumsfeld, despite leading the Pentagon during two wars, took a very personal interest in newspaper columns that critiqued his job performance.
He was even personally involved in the Defense Department's message development.
And John Edwards was derided for characterizing this White House's bumper sticker mentality. Turns out he was completely right.
You really can't beat a constant deluge of propaganda when suppressing any independent thought
Boy is that missing the real story - telegraph.co.uk
"One note will please Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. It said: "We are getting run out of Central Asia by the Russians. They are doing a considerably better job at bullying those countries than the US is doing to counter their bullying."
I'd say that was a shocking revelation.
or this "“Too often Muslims are against physical labour” because oil wealth had detached them from “the reality of work”.
Peace.
These guys could care less what the majority of the country wants.Mad men never willingly release power.They have to be driven from it.
Kucinich to force house vote on Cheney IMPEACHMENT
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Kucinich_says_he_will_force_House_1102.html
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qGwvSwOP7Ow
Don Rumsfeld is the suck.
Old Dumb Donald is at it again huh?
These republican freaks should be in jail!
Gee, another direct quote "taken out of context". It's the new one-size-fits-all rationalization, kinda like Rudy's pantyhose.
Is Rummy's office channeling Bill O?
One charter flight to the Hague, please.
Real hands on kind of guy. Mr. Memo
Bumper Sticker Quotes
I'm Spending Our Children's Inheritance
Hey, "snowflakes" are white colored and at the least don't taste bad.
That's not what Rumsfeld has been catapulting.
So how did he get any work done? That's like 5 or 6 memos an hour, plus disseminating them. Maybe he left it all up to the Pentagon boys and Bill Kristol. The ideologues at the helm don't actually work. They're too busy thinking up grand schemes, and talking to god. What a buch of f#^kwads.
Doesn't this prove that Rumsfeld is really just Glenn Reynolds? ;-)
Mr. Commander Rumsfeld.
I came up with these for your approval.
Don't Follow me I am LOST!!!
Don't worry about life; you're not going to survive it, anyway.
Earth first... We will strip the other planets later.
Fight Socialism...Vote Republican
God is my co-pilot, but the Devil is my bombardier.
Honk if you love Rush.
I Don’t Suffer From Insanity, I Enjoy Every Minute Of It
My god can beat up your god
Where There’s A Will, I’m In The Way.
The number of people staring at you is directly proportional to the stupidity of your actions.
I was kinda hoping we'd seen the last of him......these guys are running roughshod on our Constitution....and laughing all the way to the bank.
YES, VIRGINIA, THERE REALLY IS AN ‘ABOMINABLE SNOW-MAN’
mudshark @ 16:
"...get out of the dollar, teach your children Chinese, and buy as many commodities as you can."
Jim Rogers
I hope that those snowflakes are at least of the yellow persuasion Mr. Rumsfeld...
Rumsfeld - Snowflake
Tony Snow - Snowjob
Bush - Used to snort lines of snow.
Hazy shades of winter.
Batocchio @ 14:
LOL!
motorfingaz @ 7:
Absolutely. Why is everyone waiting until the other shoe drops and it is too late? Why does anyone think they are politicizing the military?
They are bringing America closer to becoming a military dictatorship with every assault on the constitution.
Does anyone remember the Paul Verhoeven movie "Starship Troopers"? I suggest rewatching it.
Why is that old fucker still out of jail??? At the very least, he should be renditioned to an eastern communist country and "re-educated".
Best case scenario: a trial at the Hague followed by execution for war crimes and crimes against humanity; of which he has NONE!!!
The only bit of this piece that is, I think, a little misleading is the suggestion that Rummy was calling Muslims lazy. Everything else is dead on, but this is actually an unfair characterization of a legitimate observation.
The reality is that most of the recruits and money for Sept 11 came, as we all know, from and through Saudi Arabia. I've had family and friends that have lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for three decades and while most people outside the kingdom know that it is very wealthy, I really don't think most people are aware of just how vastly, vastly, vastly wealthy they truly are.
When Rummy says that "unemployed" young men are easier to radicalize he is correct, if in an imprecise way. In the case of so many young Saudi men it is because they are essentially economically independent and idle. To borrow from Colbert, the Saudi radicals are high-status idiots. And their resentment isn't that they don't have jobs or are lazy and don't want to work (as Keith is interpreting the assertion), their resentment is about the cultural and military influence of the decadent West. Take religious fundamentalism + plenty of free time + vast wealth and you get a pretty terrible problem (sounds sort of like the neocons of the Bush administration, no?). The Saudi royals have long been as intensely concerned as they have been helpless about this trend — recall that they've had some extraordinary terrorists attacks inside their own borders as well — and I bet they do wish that they could get these guys to spend most of their days working at some job as well.
Much as I hate to defend Rummy, I expect he knew all of this well enough. He wasn't calling Muslims lazy. That's simply an unhelpful contribution to the conversation.
Rummy had a messianic complex, and believed in self-flagellation, standing hour-after-hour at his stand-up desk, no time to think, just cranking out POS after POS, in flurries, no time to DO anything, just scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. And as ridiculously torturous as this must have been for him, to act as such an imbecile, think of:
The thousands and thousands of Pentagon recipients of these avalanches of crap, who had to read them, (just in case there was a quiz), and decide whether there was any response needed from them, and if so, what. And consider that reading the works of that flake left them no time to DO anything, (except meet occasionally at the coffee machines and snigger their asses off about the latest flake), imagine:
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.
Could snowflakes be the reason the DOD so fu**ed up everything it supposedly touched during Rummy's reign? Because they didn't actually 'touch' anything, except snowflakes?
And their cheeks, to wipe the tears of laughter away?
Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think most Americans know that much about Saudi Arabia, and the way Rummy chooses his words, he is suggesting — to an American audience — that terrorists are terrorists because they are unemployed. And to Americans, being unemployed means being poor, lazy, stupid, and vulnerable to cults. So, yes, he is calling Muslims lazy.
So it's worse than misrepresenting reality, it's also pandering to our worst instincts.
Did he mention that the vast number of unemployed Iraqis are because of their STUPID policies"
1) Disbanding the Iraqi Army
2) Debaathification
3) Outsourcing to foreign contractors
They just make up the excuses as they go along.
"You snow with the flakes you have,
not with the flakes you wish you had."
WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE AGAINST THIS CRIMINAL BUSH REGIME?
great smackdown by Keith on Joyce Rumsfeld jerk of a husband.
Run, Rummy, Run!!! You can run, and you're gonna have to hide, or some foreign nation WILL arrest you and bring you at least to the point of being very uncomfortable!!
Don, this is not a newspaper, but if you are reading this i want you to know that i look forward to the day you are rotting in prison.
War Crime Rummy.
He's here. He's there. He's everywhere.
Except jail.
Get the guy to a jail cell where he oughta be.
What a POS.
"Snowflakes" - embryonic ideas, with 20 of them good for photo-ops while hundreds of thousands of others are thrown out?
Or am I confusing memos with something else?
Thin skin ... preoccupation with the press replaces any effort to craft sensible policy ... yep, it's Nixon all over again. Rumsfeld and Cheney were Nixon/Ford administration insiders, and they've been doing everything in their power to make America live the Nixonian nightmare all over again. The worst kind of deja vu. They are the worst, worst, worst.
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