You Try to Resign from the Job You Have, Not the One You Want


Rumsfeld casts a spell on Dubya

Hmmm. The other Donald tells Larry King that he tried to send himself out to pasture twice following reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib, but both times the dauphin insisted he stick around--sort of like a bad cold.

I felt that he ought to make the decision as to whether or not I stayed on," Rumsfeld said Thursday on CNN's "Larry King Live" program. "He made that decision and said he did want me to stay on."

Rumsfeld indicated that he felt a measure of responsibility for the scandal. At a Senate hearing in May, Rumsfeld said the abuses occurred on his watch and "I take full responsibility."

After taking "full responsibility," he then suggested that stuff happens:

"The problem is, this kind of thing occurs in prisons across the country and across the world," he said. "And you have to know it's going to be a possibility.

Well, to his credit, he didn't chalk it up as fraternity pranks, but that hardly seems to be a mea culpa statement.

Rummy also suggested that a lawsuit accusing him of war crimes might preclude his attendance at a security conference in Germany this summer. Well, that's a small measure of justice, I guess.

More interesting to me is Dubya's insistance that Rummy stay at the helm. Because that indicates--very strongly--that the Commander-in-Chief has a bit of a problem (no, make that a BIG problem) with, um, commanding.

I guess Bush is finding out that it doesn't matter how many pairs of socks he puts on in the morning. The shoes are still too big.

This morning also has reports of the Gonzales confirmation (60-38 in favor, including--sadly, but not really unexpected--a 'yea' vote from the Senior Senator of the Gret Stet). I'm sure Alberto felt like he was left exposed and twisting in the wind for a while, and I sincerely hope he manages to recover from the damage it must have done to his psyche and maybe even his constitution (um, that was satire). You can say, I guess, that Mr. Gonzales has risen to the top of the human pyramid at Justice--which, I'm sure entailed a degree of both self-humiliation and maybe even stepping on a few toes during the climb (but no word on whether he was forced to remove his clothes).

I was thinking about the confirmation hearings last night while catching a bit of news as to Alberto taking over the reins--sure, lawyers never opt for simple expressions when there are $50 dollars words and/or phrases available, but it's interesting that, as the Chronicle article notes, a week before Gonzales's grilling, Justice "published a new legal definition of torture that repudiated the August 2002 memo, calling the use of torture 'abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms.'" Alberto could just as easily used similar language, yet he didn't. All the legal wrangling aside, it would've been quite easy to assert that while standards consistent with Geneva would be applied to "enemy combatants," certain rights would be denied, such as [name the right here--this could include the right to freely associate with other detainess, the right to live in barracks as opposed to jail cells, etc.]. Would that have impressed me? Probably not. But it likely would have been found acceptable by the big shots. Instead, Gonzales CHOSE to use language that was deliberately vague--both for CYA purposes AND to allow a little "washboarding" here and there (and god knows what the hell else).

I suppose there's some good news that 38 Senators voted "nay" to this sort of hypocrisy. Supposedly this will taint Alberto to the extent that his rise to the slag heap known as the Supreme Court is now on permenant delay. But, then again, I thought Bush's first term would be a caretaker regime, given that, well, it wasn't as if he'd actually WON that election...