[Gnu-arch-users] [OT] the poetry of donald rumsfeld

[Tom Lord]

So, here's the news item (and i use that term advisedly):

    http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/17/15138/5087

but, here's the poetry.   This is rumsfeld speaking on "Face the
Nation".  This is, apparently, his complete response to a particular
question.   As you read it, you'll appreciate why I haven't bothered
to reproduce the text of the question here.   To do so would add
nothing.


In the transcript, this poem is prefaced only with the script-style
designation of speaker, "Sec. Rumsfeld:".  The line breaks are my
creation.

I've given it a title of my own choosing:

                 to kill tens of thousands of people
                (it's not as though we have certainty)
                --------------------------------------


     Mm-hmm. 
     It --
     my view of --
     of the situation was that he --
     he had -- 
     we --
     we believe, 

     the best intelligence that
     we had and other countries had and that --
     that we believed 
     and we still do not know --
     we will know. 

     David Kay said we're about 85 percent there. 
     I don't know if that's the right percentage. 
     But the Iraqi Survey Group -- we've got 1,200 people out there
     looking. 

     It's a country
     the size of California. 

     He could have hidden his --
     enough chemical or biol --
     enough biological weapons in that hole that

     -- that we found Saddam Hussein in

     to kill tens of thousands of people. 

     So --
     so it's not as though 
     we have certainty
     today. 



(The US now has a huge base in the middle east.  We win, haha.  Look
no further (except to note that iraq was notably weak) for an
understanding of why we went to war.  I'm personally quite uncertain
that that was a bad idea.  But jeeze, I wish they would just say that,
straight up.  So I'll do it for them.)

(And de-poeticizing: "He could have hidden his -- enough chemical or
biol -- enough biological weapons in that hole that -- that we found
Saddam Hussein in to kill tens of thousands of people."  Yeah, that's
a good example of the nub of the crux and as good as an excuse as
there may or may not be for being the global bully.  Let's just all
get along, shall we?  Gosh, it's hot today.  Sweltering, heat.)

-t