Rumsfeld's Resume

The Portland Oregonian's David Sarasohn has excellent op ed today on the worst defense secretary ever, Donald Rumsfeld. He expresses surprise that some are surprised that Rummy has managed to avoid investigations on the Boeing Tanker fiasco.

Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a $23.5 billion Pentagon deal to lease tankers from Boeing, a deal that has already sent two people to jail and was described by a Pentagon auditor as the dirtiest he'd seen in 33 years on the job. Somehow, the report from the Pentagon auditor general made no mention whatsoever of the people who were running the Defense Department at the time, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

"You found nothing in your interviews with the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense that was relevant to this report?" asked committee chairman John Warner, R-Va., in what the Chicago Tribune called "a surprised tone."

But the surprise is that anyone would be surprised.

The Teflon Secretary of Defense:

For the past five years, Donald Rumsfeld has achieved a steady record of disaster without responsibility.

Rumsfeld's ability to parachute out the back of the tanker scandal is particularly striking because former Air Force Secretary James Roche told investigators the secretary ordered him to back the idea: "He did not want me to budge on the tanker lease proposal."

But the tankers fly in formation with a long list of calamities out of Rumsfeld's office, from the repeated miscalculation of the realities of Iraq, to decisions on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to a sharp fall in enlistments that the Defense Department is dealing with by moving around the numbers.

It's a resume to run from -- except that somehow, if you're Don Rumsfeld, it never catches up with you.

I'm not going to do any more copy and pastes, go check out Sarasohn's column. He has written Rumsfeld's resume and it is indeed a resume to run from....

.....except that somehow, if you're Don Rumsfeld, it never catches up with you.