Robert Draper’s GQ article on Donald Rumsfeld and accompanying art.
Frank Rich’s op-ed in The New York Times referencing the article.
Steve Benen notes the Katrina parts of the story:
I’m reluctant to highlight just one anecdote from Robert Draper’s GQ piece on Donald Rumsfeld, because there’s an awful lot of information in the article that deserves to be read, but the story about Rumsfeld during the Hurricane Katrina crisis is remarkable.
As Draper explained, there were search-and-rescue helicopters available for New Orleans, but Rumsfeld refused to approve their deployment, despite the belief from the commander of Joint Task Force Katrina that they were needed.
Allah Pundit has doubts:
That’s the jumping-off point for a long, gossipy, engrossing analysis of how Rumsfeld (almost) ruined everything, from Iraq to U.S./Russia relations to even the feds’ Katrina response. So damning is it that it’s almost self-discrediting: He simply couldn’t have been that bad for that long and stayed on the job, Bush’s famous reputation for loyalty notwithstanding, so we’re left to puzzle out how much of the dish is simple scapegoating by other anonymous Bush officials eager to push blame onto the media’s favorite whipping boy.
But most commentary thus far has focused on the Bible Quotes in the pictures.
More as the story develops, which I’m sure it will.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan
UPDATE #2: More from Hilzoy
ABC’s The Note
UPDATE #3: Kevin Drum’s quote of the day post in full:
From Fran Townsend, George Bush’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, when White House chief of staff Andy Card called during Hurricane Rita to ask her what she needed:
“I want to know if the president knows what a fucking asshole Don Rumsfeld is.”
Probably not. But plenty of other people did. Robert Draper’s full story is here.
UPDATE #4: A summery of the story in Daily Beast.
UPDATE #5: Paul Krugman
UPDATE #6: David Frum, who notes the silence on the conservative side about this article, the fascination with the Bible quotes, and says:
Conservatives should be focused instead on a very different question – an unpleasant one, but one absolutely essential to our indispensable, inevitable but still postponed reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration. The question is: Why did Iraq go so very badly wrong – and why, having gone wrong, did it take so ruinously wrong for the administration to shift to a more successful course? Conservatives rightly take pride and comfort in the achievements of the surge. But the surge does not banish all the antecedent questions about Iraq. The surge may have rescued the American position in Iraq from total disaster, but nobody would describe the present situation in Iraq as anything like satisfactory.
Many, many writers have reported on this history. No definitive answer has ever been reached. Definitiveness has eluded writers in part because there is so much blame to go around. Yet there is something else too, a special factor: the mysterious personality of Donald Rumsfeld. More than any other figure in the administration, Rumsfeld is elusive, his decision-making opaque, his motives inaccessible.
K-Lo has Rumsfeld’s office’s statement.
2 Comments
May 18, 2009 at 11:19 pm
[...] “Stuff Happens” -Rumsfeld 412:2003 [...]
May 19, 2009 at 11:06 pm
[...] “Stuff Happens” -Rumsfeld 412:2003 [...]