Golden Parachutes, Silver Linings, Lead Weights

The current drumbeat to shitcan esteemed Risk champion (and part-time SecDef) Donald Rumsfeld is amusing enough, but more for what it reveals about managerial priorities within the organizational structure of Junior's bubbleocracy. From a standpoint of competence and functionality, it really doesn't matter much whether Rumsfeld is fired or not. He'd be replaced either with another incompetent flunky; or a general willing to shred his reputation by associating with these animals and letting them reduce him to yet another incompetent flunky; or in a spirit of cynically misplaced Bushie ecumenicism, Holy Joe Lieberman. (That last possibility might not be all that bad, as it would allow for the Nutmeg State to fill Lieberman's seat with an actual Democrat.) Hell, since this gang has heretofore operated on little but spite and bile, it's not beyond them to consider the notion of replacing Rummy with Tom DeLay.

Unless and until Chimpco collectively decide to change course -- which obviously is never going to happen, no matter how eagerly Democrats want to roll up their sleeves and Work Together with these morons -- the principles at work are set for failure. In terms of moral courage, yeah, the whole lot of them should resign immediately and perhaps consider the virtues of honorably sucking on an exhaust pipe. But we are talking about people with neither the moral courage nor the political imperative to do much of anything constructive. Rumsfeld's resignation would almost certainly be accompanied by the subsequent conferral of the nation's highest tinfoil-plated honor, the Slam Dunk Medal of Freederific Conduct. After which a forgetful nation turns back, with astonishing credulousness, to the spectacle of Katie Couric -- who is to serious journalism what Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill is to the art of winemaking -- pretending to be a serious news something-or-other.

No, these people have fucked things up royally, and do not seem particularly inclined to unfuck themselves. It is unfortunate that we all must continue to live with their incompetence and shameful lack of moral principle, but we can always start taking responsibility, remembering whom to blame for the rise of these assholes, and make goddamned sure none of them -- the neocons, the theocons, the Schiavo/Falwell wing of the Grand Old Police Blotter -- get off the margins again, much less back into the halls of power.

That's accountability, and the closest people like Rumsfeld and Cheney will ever see of anything roughly akin to accountability is to make sure their mistakes are irretrievably hung around their necks for all time. So leave Rummy in -- at least until November. It's not like they were going to replace him with someone remotely competent anyway.