I love Don. He is a walking illustration of soooo many varieties of Wrong. What is this Wrong of which she speaks? Causing the suffering and death of others, for no damn good reason at all. Blind stupidity? That’ll do.
Many senior administration officials were frustrated by the Department of Defense’s repeated disinclination to play by the rules, arriving at meetings unprepared, refusing to discuss or advance issues, and working through back channels. One NSC staffer complained he spent half his time ‘cleaning up DoD’s messes, much of the time actually at the Pentagon, trying to soothe military leadership who had been snubbed or burned by Rummy and his guys.’
I’m surprised Don’s lasted as long as he has. But then, like, Bush would trouble himself to perceive? Naw, they’re a mind-blind bunch, and there is a terrible irony in these banding together of broken men, who only know the world as object-for-self. So they do have some creepy sense of one another. Feh. You can have ‘em. Broken.
The acrimony between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and other agencies has become legend. According to one individual who served on the Bush 43 NSC staff, they were ‘just out of control, an endless nightmare.’ Another NSC staffer from George W. Bush’s first term said that ‘OSD was nuts … We would say they were out of their fucking minds both from a policy perspective and from a process perspective. In effect, [Rumsfeld] said, I don’t give a shit what the NSC staff says, I am going to do whatever I feel is in my right to do as the chain of command to the president. He was like his own venture capitalist. He liked to dabble in different areas and throw things here and throw things there … We would characterize Rumsfeld as Secretary Strangelove.’
