Rumsfeld &c
Now that I’ve spent an entire afternoon doing work at the fringes of my responsibilities leading up to the grad show, I’m wasting another few minutes before diving into SuperCollider for a few hours. Some news:
First, a Bill Moyers speech, containing some post-election ruminations on news coverage and the religious right. Unredlatedly, here’s a fascinating bit about a cellphone that turns into a sunflower when discarded.
Speaking about Iraq, Bush acknowledged some failures in an understated way at Camp Pendleton.
Speaking to Iraq-bound soldiers in Kuwait, and you should all read the rest of this post because it’s just chalk full of incredible quotes, Rumsfeld was seemingly caught off-guard by questions from soldiers about the lack of proper outfitting on less-than-armored humvees. Specialist Thomas Jerry Wilson remarked that soliders preparing to move into Iraq are “digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted—picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.” Rumsfeld needed time to come up with an answer to the soldiers’ questions, saying “Hell, I’m an old man, it’s early in the morning and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”
The Times has put together some background on Specialist Wilson. Elsewhere in America, Bush is doing his best to limit the damage, asserting that if he were “a soldier overseas, wanting to defend my country, I’d want to ask the secretary of Defense the same question.” Bush’s interest comes as something of a surprise, considering that he had rejected Kerry’s suggestion in October that there were equipment or armor shortages in Iraq.
Rumsfeld says he plans on contacting Wilson, to “find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know,” in a statment reminiscent of a certain prior Rumsfeld statement. Despite these poetics, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats have resumed their calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation, suggesting that 21 months of mismanagement of the war should be reason enough to search for a replacement for the “old man.”