[MRM]

Well, there are known knowns, then there are known unknowns. What really gets me are those unknown unknowns. But my favorite quote was "You'll have a dickens of a time finding a time when I was overoptimistic . . ." Time magazine promptly reported that "dickens" apparently means "ridiculously easy".

Look, I'm as conservative as they come and have a Republican pedigree that stretches back to the Civil War. My parents voted for Ike because Nixon was his running mate and then counted the times they could vote for him after that. (Five times on a national ticket - two as VP, three as president - if you're counting). My family still considers the 1960 and 1964 elections as the darkest moments in our country's history. Well, outside of wartime or the Great Depression, anyway.

But even so, I have to call a spade a spade. Rumsfeld was not the right guy for the job. He made terrible calls, and then went into spin control to claim that setbacks weren't setbacks so he and the administration didn't have to admit they made mistakes. The result was that in failing to admit mistakes, they couldn't do what they needed to correct them.

So here we are years later in a worse position than we started and he's still digging us deeper into the hole. At the very least he needed to go. Any guy who can claim with a straight face that the enemy is getting weaker because their attacks are increasing and getting more effective is eithere delusional or lying. Either way, he's not fit for command.