The Warheads in the 5-point building

It's not like I'm a fan of Army Secretary Thomas E. White, former Enron executive and fat cat. But isn't there an adage about "my enemy's enemy is my friend?" What I mean is that anyone who is a thorn in the side of Donnie Rumsfeld is... well, okay, I still don't think I'd invite White over for dinner or anything, but I'm glad to root for him from afar. This article (originally from the LA Times, who make you register to read and then put their articles in archives after 7 days--boo!) discusses the current situation, which involves not following the proper spin cycle...

Recently, he again irked the Pentagon's civilian leaders by refusing to challenge Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's prediction that it could take "hundreds of thousands" of U.S. troops to keep the peace in a postwar Iraq.

Pentagon's civilian leaders (read: Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) are notorious for dicatating policy and valuing yes-men and not skeptics or critical voices. From the above article we learn that the Air Force Secretary feels undermined by the Pentagon, that there is no secretary or undersecretary of the Navy right now, and that Shinseki, the Army's top military officer, has been a lame duck since Rumsfeld named his successor nearly 15 months before the general's scheduled retirement in June.

So it really is the Rums n' Wolfy Show, as long as some of these people with ACTUAL MILITARY EXPERIENCE would stop shooting off their mouths about how many troops they think will be required. Since Rumsfeld is such an accomplished public speaker himself, able to turn the headlines of European papers and the stomachs of European populations, the BBC has put together the Donald Rumsfeld soundbite archive though it is out of date by many months now.

Have you heard the infamous Kissinger quote about Rummy? He called him the most ruthless man I know. Comforting, huh?

Wolfowitz, by the way, looks like a weasely bad guy from Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers. Thanks to the genius of military web design, you can get a version of Wolfowitz's image which is so hi-res you could print a poster from it. Watch it fill your browser window! You don't want to see his eyes this big. You don't want to know!