Rummy's Player

In "honor" of the tenth anniversary of "Shock and Awe," here's a little ditty I wrote back in early 2003.

RUMMY'S PLAYER

He are a drunken driver with a silver spoon

his Junker father spat into his tomcat mouth

(they is an old-time family founded on appointments,

an oily bunch of skull-and-boney schoolyard bullies).

He are no self-made man, no rocket scientist,

but just a five-to-four minority pretender,

a spastic spoiler of subject-verb agreement,

a legacy admission threatening to use

tactical atomic weapons to destroy

reinforced Iraqi bunkers underground. 

*

When you hear the Serious People all agreeing about something, whether it's a war in Iraq or Iran, a "debt crisis," or the impending doom of Social Security—BEWARE.

*

And Rummy still can't admit he was wrong:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.
— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

935

935 was the year King Wenceslas was murdered, he of the song.

It's also the number of a Porsche.

And it's the number of "false statements" made by "President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" "in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

So the next time somebody tries to tell you that the war was not fought on false pretenses, remember that number: the year Wenceslas died, or a good sports car, or the number of lies Bush and Co. told, as "part of an orchestrated campaign that ... led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

I am so grateful to the people who put this "War Card" together. After all, they made clear that many of the things Rummy called "unknown unknowns" were actually perfectly well known "knowns" that he was lying about.