Rumsfeld in Wonderland

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lives in a fantasy world.
It is a very nice fantasy world all told, happy little capitalists jet to
work in free market rocketships, parents ecstatically waving vouchers send their kids to private schools, US troops are hailed as liberators throughout Iraq, and the schoolchildren of Tikrit will soon be downloading the sermons of Pastor John Hagee from the internet unmolested.
In sum a sort of low tax no government Heritage Foundation Utopia available
to all consumers.
Those helpful souls at NPR broadcast the Secretary's appearance at the
National Press Club, a very suggestive use of the public airwaves it was too.
A surprising amount of the talk was given over to the Secretary's
simpleminded economic nostrums.
Don Rumsfeld thinks he is a businessman with a lavish experience of the
private sector. Never mind his origins as a sort of Waylon Smithers character in the Ford White House, Don still thinks his decades of crony capitalism qualify him as simple entrepreneur.
Don Rumsfeld worships the so called free market, with naive intensity. This
allows him to conveniently forget his years of raking it off the top via a
rolodex stuffed with vital phone numbers and pass himself off as a rugged
individualist/moralist...a kind of Tarzan for the Rotary Club.
"Government doesn't create jobs and investment, the private sector does" he piously squawked at one point.
Which is nothing sort of bleakly hilarious given the fact that he spent a
good portion of the interview defending the President's request of 87 billion
tax-payer's dollars for Iraqi reconstruction.
THAT according to Secretary Rumsfeld is a perfectly fine use of public funds.
The irony of course, doesn't occur to Mr. Rumsfeld but then as I've said
before true believers are not known for their sense of humor.
Of course the language of this 87 billion dollar boondoggle is couched in all
the latest rightical chic jargon, it'll be used to "build opportunity" and
"unleash the productive powers of the Iraqi people"...
Smells like a subsidy to me kids.
A big fat subsidy to pay for something that Rummy, Wolfowitz, Perle etc were all claiming would pay for itself painlessly via oil revenues not five months ago.
87 billion could go a long ways to terror-proofing vulnerable industries,
ports and institutions in America. It would buy a lot of first responder training for Police and Firefighters.
But they are never gonna see a penny of that money not as long as Rummie and his fellow acolytes are still mesmerized by a vision of Iraq as a free market utopia.
And that is what we are fighting for in Iraq, to give those poor benighted
hottentots the same opportunities as any smart finance worshipping GOP hack.
The Secretary of Defense's delusional missionary zeal is nothing sort of
appalling given our steady casualties in Iraq.
The link between our occupation of Iraq and the need to prothelytize modern business civilization therein was heavy and explicit in this speech.
Irrational?
Yes especially given the casualty rates....but it's all to the greater good in Rummie's mind.
That is what those guys are dying for, the chance to create an "opportunity
society" in the Middle East.
Sick
Demented
Typical....