MESHUGGAH... RUMMY? BUSH?

On the 6AM conference call with the DWT art department-- kudos to Adam for snapping that great photo of Hillary this morning before she was able to put on her makeup and disguise her corporate self as a Democrat-- we tossed around some ideas for the day's stories. Yesterday our pal Danny had sent me a disturbingly pointed e-mail about the Secretary of Defense of the United States (of America)... "He's going meshuggah," postulated Danny, a guy with a dependably keen sense of direction. So this morning I told the art staff to get on the case of tracking down Rummy and seeing if they could get a photo of him looking meshuggah. Then I went for a swim. By the time I was done with my laps our... asset at the Pentagon had already sent back a disturbingly meshuggah picture of the Secretary of Defense and I was thinking that maybe it is a good thing that the ex-alcoholic, coke-snorter, messianic religionist fanatic has the nuclear codes football after all. So I went upstairs to get dressed for my morning walk in the Los Feliz hills.

That's where the trouble began. Not in the hills-- they were crystal clear and sublime-- upstairs. As I am prone to do, I flipped on CNN while I was getting dressed. And guess who was doing a press conference! Before I could abort the putting-on-the-tee-shirt-operation and shut the thing off I realized he was talking about polio and meeting with the dude from the World Health Organization about bird flu and other dreadful diseases he wants to use to get peoples' minds off the disaster in Iraq, Alito's floundering nomination and Republican treason and bribery scandals. Harmless, enough, I thought, as I proceeded to "operation socks." But that's when it started.

The first reporter he called on after the polio warning asked him about how we're gonna get the kidnapped American back from the Iraqi insurgents. He blinked his eyes once or twice-- as though reprogramming himself-- and launched into a set speech on how "they kill women and children and have no regard for humanity." Do you think anyone has ever discussed the American military theories behind the collateral damage strategy? Or would they figure that's too tough for him to handle? Anyway, one he went with one lie and distortion on top of another. God only knows what the poor World Health dude was thinking while Bush unraveled. (I never found out because, with only one sock on, I scrambled for the remote and shut the damn thing down for the day-- well, until SOUTH PARK tonight.)

So I say to myself, "Self, here we have that awesome photo someone risked their ass to smuggle out of a secret Pentagon basement but isn't Bush even crazier than Rummy and shouldn't I do a story on how crazy he is?" A quandary. I mean, sure Kerry is demanding Rummy be replaced by someone with actual military experience but he gave that a tepid try in regard to Bush a couple years ago and it didn't go anywhere either. But everybody is always writing that Bush is loco. I mean that piece in the new NEW YORKER by Seymour Hersh offers conclusive evidence that Bush drank the religionist kool-aide and is plumb insane and even foreigners are offering evidence of Bush's disconnect with objective reality.

So let everybody else write about Bush being a nutcase, today will be dedicated to Rummy's tragic fall over the cliff of sanity. You might want to take a look at a little redux of his slippage by a sharp Buzzflash correspondant before we delve into the psychological analysis.

And, look, just because "meshuggah" is such a cutesy word, it doesn't mean that the U.S. government shouldn't take it seriously. In fact we were just reminded of how the State Department branded one of their ambassadors "meshuggah" in 1988 and forced him to retire. (It's a little tangent but you ought to read about how US Ambassador to India John Gunther Dean, a Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany, was accused of being mentally unbalanced when he reported his suspicions to DC that the Mossad had downed the plane of Pakistani President Zia to prevent the "Muslim nuclear bomb" and was forced to retire. Included in the plane "accident" were the US Ambassador to Pakistan and a US general, I guess what Bush Jr's regime might call "collateral damage" today.)

Now Rummy didn't accuse his pals at the Mossad of nothing, of course. He saved his accusations for the disastrous failures of his Iraq policies for... the U.S. media. (I noticed Bush doing the same thing in his press conference rant today.) As Will Dunham pointed out in a Reuters report yesterday, Rummy "spoke just days after the U.S. military acknowledged that it had paid Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American news stories written by an 'information operations' task force. Rumsfeld complained that the issue 'has been pounded in the media' but 'we don't know what the facts are yet.'" Yes, whenever anyone catches Rummy doing anything... torturing, rendering, collateral damaging... the facts are never in yet.

He continued babbling: "We've arrived at a strange time in this country where the worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press, and reported and spread around the world, often with little context and little scrutiny, let alone correction or accountability after the fact."

Of course, as with anything and everything that involves this Regime (think Cheney, Rove, Libby, Bush, Rummy...), nothing is ever as it seems on the surface. Sure, Rumsfeld is crazy as a loon. But he has been for a very long time. Why now the drumbeat for his removal? Simple: they want to replace him with someone even worse (and at the same time bi-partisanize the occupation). Now who would fit that bill better than a war-mongering Likud agent? Let's see... Ah... Joe Lieberman, a Democratic Senator and Bush ass-licker, would do it in an instant. And he would then be replaced by Christopher Shays (R-CT) thanks to the Republican governor of Connecticut Jodi Rell. And, of course, the lame, hapless Kerry stumbled right into their trap.


WEDNESDAY EVENING MESHUGGAH UPDATE:

It looks like we're not the only ones who think Rummy's lost it. Stephen Pizzo has also noticed that Rumsfeld is as mad as a hatter. "We now have a certifiable loon in charge of the most powerful military on the face of the earth. Shouldn't someone do something?" And I don't think replacing him with Lieberman is what Pizzo has in mind.