Gin Rummy - The Game Where We All Die in the End

Who is in charge at the Department of Defense? It's certainly not Donald Rumsfeld, who only looks competent standing next to Michael Brown. What does Rumsfeld do all day, drink gin and play Minesweeper on his computer? Two cases in point:

Even though he is a member of the secretive Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, that unanimously approved the United Arab Emirates take-over of the management of key U.S. ports, he claims to have just learned of the decision. From a press briefing on Tuesday:

QUESTION: Are you confident that any problems with security — from what you know, are you confident that any problems with security would not be greater with a UAE company running this than an American company?

RUMSFELD: I am reluctant to make judgments based on the minimal amount of information I have because I just heard about this over the weekend.

Just heard about this issue over the weekend? Weren't you paying attention on February 13 when you and your buddies approved the sale?? Shouldn't you concern yourself with the fact that a Middle Eastern government is taking over partial operation of our key ports??? Especially when that Middle Eastern government also just received a contract to transport U.S. military equipment into and out of the United States????

And then there is Rumsfeld's strange admission that he didn't know that the military was paying Iraqi reporters to write favorable stories on the U.S. occupation. And that when he found out he was told it would stop. But, that it hasn't stopped. And he doesn't know when - and if - it will stop.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday he was mistaken when he stated last week that the U.S. military had stopped paying Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American articles.

"I just misstated the facts," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday.

[snip]

On "The Charlie Rose Show," aired on PBS stations, Rumsfeld said, "The press got it, then the Congress starts calling for hearings and fussing about this, and complaining about that, as though it was something terrible that happened."

"It wasn't anything terrible that happened. When we heard about it, we said, 'Gee, that's not what we ought to be doing.' And we told the people down there, and they -- they told the contractor who did it -- it wasn't a military person -- and they stopped doing that," Rumsfeld added in the interview.

Bribing reporters. Selling our ports. Torturing detainees. Making sure our soldiers have the resources they need to stay alive. Figuring out where the Iraqi terrorists are getting their explosives. Finding Bin Laden. There sure are a lot things this Secretary of Defense knows absolutely nothing about. Is he literally just Dick Cheney's secretary?