Safire

I'm pretty sure that William Safire has just lost his mind entirely.  It's not just that he's making a--ahem--tortured argument in today's column, titled "Rumsfeld Should Stay".  It's that whatever he's saying is absolutely incoherent, not so much as touched by any shred of evidence or logic.  I know I did this last week, but it's so bad that it's worth looking at in the same manner:

Paragraph One:  Rumsfeld is under pressure, but he must stay.

Paragraph Two-Five:  Rumsfeld is a good guy, and I am very important.  I know this because I wrote a lot about how much I hated military tribunals, and Rumsfeld demanded investigation into them only because of my writing.  He is a good civil libertarian.

Paragraph Six-Seven:  Rumsfeld took responsibility for the torture, despite the fact that his command structure failed him and us.

Paragraph Eight:  Senator Mark Dayton was very rude.

Paragraph Nine:  There was no cover up.

Paragraph Ten:  No all the other POW's around the world will whine and bitch that they aren't being treated nicely.

Paragraph Eleven:  Torture is bad, but sometimes it is actually good.

Paragraph Twelve:  Rummy is a good man.  Don't make him a scapegoat.

Paragraph Thirteen:  If Rummy quits, we'll pull out of Iraq. 

Look, I'll get to some of these "arguments" in a second, but how truly bad is this writing?  Op-ed columns are not long, and the utterly random tangents are not helpful.  In a piece supposed to make an argument about how Rummy should stay, there's really just two arguments:  it's not his fault, and we need him to stay the course in Iraq.  This randomly inserted attack on Mark Dayton, the theoretical musings about the utility of torture, the bizarro world insinuation that we should have kept this secret so that the other POW's would keep their mouths shut--what the hell is this?  Time to retire, Bill.  It's one thing to be a conservative crank.  It's another to be an objectively bad writer.

But as for the actual arguments, I notice that Safire can't offer any reason whatsoever to believe that Rumsfeld is a good man, beyond the responsiveness to civil liberties concerns with regard to military tribunals.  And you know what?  I don't give a shit if he's a good man.  He, like the rest of these clowns, have demonstrated themselves--even in the eyes of many conservatives--to be utterly incompetent in Iraq. 

Rumsfeld's resignation is important for another reason:  it's sends an important signal to the world that we actually care about what has happened to those prisoners. If Rummy keeps his job, it's pretty much a gigantic middle finger to the rest of the world:  we're sorry, but not that sorry.  And in the days of terror, signals matter.  Signals fucking matter.

1:02:40 PM    comment []