Picture of a City on a Hill, Crumbling:
Remember the moral high ground? Do you think Donald Rumsfeld does? Here he was, way back in March 2003, after Iraqi television dared to show five captured Americans: "It is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them." It was ballsy even then to say this, what with hundreds of captured Afghanis and others cooking on the concrete at Guantanamo, enduring "humiliation" in order to get them "softened" for "interrogation." But it's extra ballsy now, to think that Rumsfeld was implying that those responsible for the Iraqi broadcast, surely including the leadership of the nation, were war criminals under international law.

Goddamn, it was great when we were so fucking right about everything. In late 2002, Paul "No, Really, It's Not About Israel" Wolfowitz dared to invoke former weapons inspector Scott Ritter even as the administration was setting about to discredit him in that darling way the Bushkoviks have perfected. Said Wolfman Paul of Abu Ghraib, "It was a scene more horrible than [Ritter] was willing to say, but what he did say was bad enough. He described a prison in Baghdad whose stench was unreal. It was an amalgam of 'urine, feces, vomit and sweat,' a hellhole where prisoners were, as he reports it, 'howling and dying of thirst.' The oldest prisoners were 12 years old, the youngest, toddlers. Their crime: being children of political enemies of the Iraqi regime. It’s hard to imagine a more grim symbol of a regime that rules by terror and which embraces terror as a policy against those who oppose it than a children’s prison." Damn, they're good at attribution when it suits their purposes. Oh, then, irony of ironies, Wolfie added, "That regime poses a particular danger to the Iraqi people."

And, holy shit and motherfuck, remember absolutism? When, in September 2002, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the same committee he has bullied up to last Friday, Rumsfeld said as "facts" (his word) about Saddam Hussein: "He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including Anthrax, botulism, toxins and possibly smallpox. He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas. His regime has an active program to acquire nuclear weapons. His regime has dozens of ballistic missiles and is working to extend their ranges in violation of UN restrictions." Christ, imagine if you were the CEO of a corporation and you overstated earnings, used shell companies, and hid debt from investors, all the while stating as "facts" lies about the solid earnings so that your stock would soar. Imagine what might happen . . . oh, never mind.

Rumsfeld resign? You got to be fuckin’ kidding. The Rude Pundit wants that narrow-eyed, cap-toothed bastard to stay and watch as, on his watch, the whole Iraq “dream” crumbles into a pool of hubris and stupidity. He wants to see Donald Rumsfeld stand on the smoldering ruins of American credibility, wearing tatters and holding the pseudo-Israeli Iraqi flag tight, like a rosary, praying for what was lost, for what could never be.

The Rude Pundit wants Donald Rumsfeld to be stripped naked and put on display at the Smithsonian, right next to the Enola Gay. There, men, women and children can point to his shriveled cock and marble-ized balls and laugh. And every couple of hours, just as he’s getting weary, cold blood will be dumped on Rumsfeld, blood from 10,000 or more civilians dead because of him. There’ll be a broomstick there to poke him with and maybe some lucky citizen will get to sodomize him with it. And if he dares cry, if a tear deigns to fall from his squint, we’ll shove a cattle prod under his scrotum to make him twitch, thrash like a trout in a pail, all the while asking him, cold, blood-covered, electrified, “Is this torture, motherfucker, or is it just abuse?” And if he doesn’t answer, we’ll make him try to lift his lifeless dick and jack off for us. We’ll have it on live pay-per-view 'cause Fox sure as shit ain't gonna show it.

We’ll drag in Wolfman Paul, nude, we’ll drag him by on a leash, make him lick our shoes. We’ll make Rumsfeld watch as we shove a light bulb up Wolfie’s ass and then sic the dogs on him. And we’ll tell Rummy that worse waits for him. Goddamn, isn’t the Smithsonian a great place for the revelation of our national shame? And our cause will be just because we know that Rumsfeld is not innocent.

And when he is softened up, after a day, a week, a month of this, we’ll dress him in rags, keep him some distance from us because of the smell of shit and blood and rot coming from him, and seat him back in that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room, and get John McCain, who knows from torture, and Hillary Clinton, who knows from partisanship, to ask him, “Now, Mr. Secretary, what did you know, when did you know it, and why the fuck did you do nothing about it?”

'Cause, you see, we know from Rumsfeld's own words, there are known knowns, things we know we know. There are known unknowns - things we know we do not know. We're fucked though, because there are still the unknown unknowns, things we have no idea about.