Donald Rumsfeld Gives Advice to Young People:
Getting advice from Donald Rumsfeld is like a 12 year-old girl asking her elderly uncle who just finished fondling her what he wants for dinner. At some point, does it matter that Uncle Chester wants to order out for Thai? Really, and, c'mon, Chester can eat pizza or Chinese. Or just eat shit and die.

Still, here's the advice Rumsfeld gave last week to students at Kansas State University the day after he was finally shitcanned by the White House. The outgoing Secretary of Defense was asked what advice he would give to young people, and he actually answered, "Study history."

Rummy continued, betraying not a hint of irony, "We need context. We've staked everything in this country -- if you think about the gamble, we stake everything on the people, that they can -- given sufficient information, will make the right decisions. They need context. We need context. History provides that context. And if there's one piece of advice I could give, it would be to focus on that and think about it and understand it. It will improve the ability of all of us to function as citizens in this great republic."

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that the image of Donald Rumsfeld in a room with young people is reminiscent of Death entering Prince Prospero's party in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." And let's leave aside the idea that Donald Rumsfeld has any minor league grasp of history. The cap-toothed motherfucker cherry-picked history the same way he did WMD intelligence: World War II? Fine, yeah, great. But let's put Vietnam as a footnote that doesn't get released to the general public. And the British experience in Iraq nearly a century ago? Not even on the radar.

Instead, let's say this: real advice from Rumsfeld would go something along these lines: "Learning from mistakes is for pussies. There is no past. There is the very immediate present, as in, oh, shit, am I going to get killed as I fly into Baghdad? Beyond that, there is only a future, a predetermined future tht we're gonna shove the present and past into no matter how badly the fit. Just like Cinderella's stepsisters cut off parts of their toes and heels to try to get into that glass slipper. 'Course the shoe was filled with blood, but you get the idea. It's all about pressing forward, no matter how much blood might be involved."