I can’t get this wonderfully sweet Swedish indie song out of my head. Plus the video’s pretty awesome.

Peter, Bjorn and John-Young Folks.mp3

The Donald Rumsfeld I’ll remember

Donald Rumsfeld, the man who can at once query and answer himself, and who so eloquently said of beheading, “Does anyone think that’s a good idea—to chop people’s heads off, to encourage that? I don’t,” has stepped down from his post as Secretary of Defense after completing the job of sufficiently fucking everything up in Iraq.

But there’s more to Don Rumsfeld than just poor judgment and a marked disregard for reality, accountability, and proper planning. There’s a bold willingness to carry out ideas despite a dearth of military support and a mountain of criticism. But when you scratch the surface just a little bit more, and attempt to see past what the liberal, Jew-run media would have you believe, you’ll find that there lies a beautiful poet underneath the craggy old war hawk. A poet longing to sow the seed of his verse all over the land, wherever and whenever he can. Slate.com was able to see what so many others could not, and took to transliterating his oftentimes terse and labyrinthine Pentagon press corp statements into beguiling, quotidian poetry that calls to mind the great William Carlos Williams.

I’d like to share a few of the poems that Slate has extracted from the Rumsfeld Canon:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity
I think what you’ll find,
I think what you’ll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

And then there’s the brief, philosophical Rummy ruminations on the state of this crazy thing we call life:

On NATO
You may think it’s something
I ought to know,
But I happen not to.
That’s life.
(July 9, 2003)

On Leaks
Look bumpy? Sure.
But you pick up
And go on.
That’s life.
(May 17, 2002)

On People
They’re going to have
Some impact on
What happens in that country
And that’s not wrong.
That’s life.
(Nov. 16, 2001)

On Criticism
It makes it complicated.
Sometimes, it makes
It difficult.
That’s life.
(Sept. 11, 2003)

THE POETRY OF DONALD RUMSFELD [SLATE.COM]

I know it’s wrong to laugh at children, but when it’s the red-eyed, doll-clutching, bird-flipping brood of one of the dirtiest dudes in the Senate, I don’t feel too badly about it. These photos are going to be plastered all over the place and I’m going to join in on the pileup.