Gosh, I like Donald Rumsfeld.
Sorry, but he’s brilliant and tough and has a wonderful respect for words, as he demonstrated in parrying every thrust from Bob Schieffer and Tom Friedman on Face the Nation this morning.
Of course, that does not make him a good Secretary of Defense. Even the most intelligent of us don’t grasp who we are inside and consequently mess up our dealings with external reality.
Consider Rumsfeld's comments on "Meet the Press" this morning. (Videotape made it possible to do both programs.) "Your heart breaks," he said, at the ultimate sacrifice made by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also was moved, he said, by the bravery of the Iraqis who voted last week.
No mention of the Department of Defense policy banning TV cameras at the arrival in the US of the coffins of those brave young Americans whose sacrifice so affects him. (We saw those pictures during the Vietnam War.)
No mention, either, of any of his several miscalculations, some of which contributed to the need for more coffins. (The closest we got to that was when Schieffer raised the celebrated "You go to war with the Army you have" balderdash, against which Rumsfeld held his ground.)
Is Don Rumsfeld cynical? Hypocritical? I doubt it. We all edit our minds and psyches, erasing, rewriting, forgetting (or in shrinkspeak, repressing). He's entitled to do the same.
I just wish the news guys – assuming they remember – would remind us of the contradictions more often. They don't need to scream, just look at the record.