Salon...You Bastards!

Secretary Rumsfeld resigns after Kay report, citing pledge to grandson

So I sitting at the kitchen table doing my morning news round-up and this headline pops out at me. Rummy quit?!?! Holy hell! Did I wake up in some strange universe where there is justice and evil people get screwed? I quickly skimmed the first bit of the story.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned today, in the wake of a report by weapons inspector David Kay stating that the U.S. had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The report, Rumsfeld said, "humiliated me by showing to the world that I have no regard whatsoever for the truth." To the stunned amazement of reporters at a press conference, Mr. Rumsfeld added that he had been lying consistently to the public since taking office, but that the Kay report was "the straw that broke the camel's back." Mr. Rumsfeld stated that "the Kay report shows definitively that I misled the American people when I repeatedly claimed we had evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed a serious enough threat to justify our invasion of Iraq."

Then just a glimmer of hope passed through my brain, breifly, before it crushed with one word: satire. I missed it in the header. It was my own fault really. I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up like that, in these dark times. But hey...good times.

Dark times? Aren't you being a little melodramatic about all this Pat?

I don't know. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm seeing the world through crap colored lenses. Maybe I'm just being partisan. Maybe I'm really just a tree-hugging, tax and spend, bleeding heart, die in the wool, liberal. Maybe the country isn't being run by crooks, waging war at their own whims, and looting our national treasure for themselves and their cronies. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. Maybe I'm insane. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe the Clinton years were really, really horrible and I just somehow "missed" how bad it really was.

• We went to war to stop a "bad man."
• It's gone all to hell and nobody will help us.
• The President can't rally the international community because he told them all to go to hell before the war.
• It's quite possible that people in the administration thought it would be cool to out a CIA agent to get back at a person who made the war evidence look bad. (Actually it was bad, it didn't just look bad)
• Not only is the agent's cover blown, but now we are starting to see all the things she was connected to, which are now blown.
• The administration is trying to tear down environmental laws, which we now have studies showing that they save the country money.
• The administration promised to restore honesty and integrity to the White House, yet we continually get "word parsing" and outright lies.
• Back in Iraq, we're trying to install some screwed up version of democracy and cronyism in place of totalitarianism and cronyism. I guess 1 out of 2 isn't bad. Right?

Good times everybody! Don't listen to the liberals, they hate America!

But hey, unemployment stayed steady. Things are starting to turn around!

We can hope. Of course, the tax cuts were supposed to make how many jobs again? Where are they? We get 57,000 new jobs. This administration is still very, very deep in the jobs hole and 57k isn't going to cut it. Is this the "trickle" in Trickle Down Economics®? Whiskey Bar has some points on those jobs:

• 57k jobs is about 1/4 the average monthly payroll expansion during Clinton's last term in office.
• If the economy continues to gain jobs at this rate, it will take almost four years to recover the jobs lost since Shrub was installed in power.
• Over half the jobs gained in September (58% to be precise) are what the Labor Department calls "temporary help services" -- temps, in other words. That may be great news for Manpower Inc., but it suggests business confidence remains quite fragile.

Good times!