Posted by
MrWhipple on Thursday, November 09, 2006 3:47:12 PM
I sat there on the comfy couch and cried like a baby. I am 55 and all male but there I sat openly weeping with only my faithful companion Mongo the wonder dog to comfort me.
I even predicted it was coming. When the president said just a few days before the election, that he was committed to keeping Rumsfeld and Cheney, I knew right then and there they he was out if the Dems won the election.
I had spent the past week or so working various parts of my anatomy off on the John T. Doolittle for Congress campaign so I was recovering from a major migraine and a Pepsi hangover so it is little wonder that my emotions were a bit fragile but I just couldn’t get the image of Rummy rolling under the bus out of my head.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not being critical of the President for doing it, it had to be done, if for no other reason than to gain the high ground and make the Times put our story above the fold instead of a fresh pic of Nancy’s new face (more on that later). It just saddens me that it had to happen.
I am afraid that future generations will have no idea what this man has done to change our military into a force that is prepared to fight the next war, not the last one. It is called Transformation.
Everybody always fights the last war. In the late unpleasantness between the states the War Department actually refused to issue repeating rifles because they “used too much ammunition”. In fact Custer was still using single-shot rifles when the whole Sioux nation came riding down on him with Henry repeaters. In The Great War (WWI) we were charging machine guns with horse cavalry. At the start of WWII the navy was based on the battleship instead of the aircraft carrier. We went into the jungles of Nam with tanks instead of shotguns. We actually had to buy shotguns on the streets of Bangkok because we couldn’t get them. (they weren’t exactly Geneva approved).
Anyway the whole point here is that with Transformation, Rumsfeld got us ready to fight the next war and maybe the one after that. It is this achievement that he will be lauded for long after the dust settles in Iraq.