I'm serious when I say Donald Rumsfeld has a way with words, and there's often a philosphical aspect to it. It reminds me a bit of some of the stuff I write. But it hardly makes up for some of his, um, other qualities. I wouldn't want to be him.

"Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterised as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on."

Indeed, life does go on- although I can't helping thinking about those for whom it doesn't, thanks to the war.

Glass Box (from "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, edited by Hart Seely)

You know, it's the old glass box at the -
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's -

And it's all these arms are going down in there.
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it
But -

Some of you are probably too young to remember those -
Those glass boxes,

But -
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

Unfortunately, a lot of Rumsfeld's verbal cleverness allowed him to not deal with reality, like when he said "Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence", allowing him to remain in denial on the issue of WMD's. Or what about this statement about the differant kinds of "attacks":

"A random round can be an attack, and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you've got a whole fruit bowl of different things - a banana and an apple and an orange."

Let this be a lesson to all of us who pride ourselves on our verbal cleverness.