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Rumsfeld: Pentagon Waste Caused by Excess Photocopiers
When Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense in 2001, he vowed to bring change to the Pentagon. If anything, he was harsher in his criticism of the DOD's dysfunction than Gates and Obama are now. In a speech on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld called the department's bureaucracy "an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. In this building, despite this era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicative duties and bloated bureaucracy..."
Rumsfeld pledged to fix the DOD's archaic accounting system—which had lost track of $2.3 trillion in transactions—to root out waste, and to fix a procurement system that routinely delivered expensive, outdated weapons programs. Unfortunately, things didn't exactly work out that way. So what happened? Well, Bradley Graham's new 600-plus-page opus on the life and works of Donald Rumsfeld provides a couple of intriguing clues.
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Donald Rumsfeld, Responsible for Yet Another Blunder
Sometimes I can't believe Donald Rumsfeld (a very committed liar, by the way) was ever in a position of power....
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Shock and Audit
MoJo Dissects the Defense Budget So You Don't Have to.
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Why Rumsfeld Should Be Sacked (A Very Long But Incomplete List of Reasons)
How many times have I heard some piece of breaking news, usually reporting a fresh outrage of the Bush administration's,...
Justin Elliot over at TPM picks up one interesting tidbit—that Rumsfeld may have been reluctant to cancel big weapons programs because of his own considerable financial stake in the defense sector. "Several of Rumsfeld's associates saw the secretary's inclination to put off big cuts early on as a direct result of his own financial situation," Graham writes. Before arriving at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was supposed to divest himself of the interests in his $50-$210 million portfolio that did business with the DOD. "But the divesture process was going slowly because a considerable amount of Rumsfeld's wealth was in private partnerships and closely held corporations that were difficult to sell. Under the circumstances, Rumsfeld told associates he was hesitant to take significant action on defense acquistion programs."
On at least one occasion, Rumsfeld simply dropped the ball on his ambitious promises. Take his pledge to fix the department's woeful accounting practices. He set up a council of senior advisers to oversee reform and counter the parochialism of the services. But according to Graham, Rumsfeld never showed up for a single meeting of the council, and so all the talk of reform went nowhere.
Or maybe Rumsfeld was just plain clueless. At one point, Rumsfeld is grilling an underling about how to trim $45 billion from a budget plan and remarks, "There's so much waste in this department. I saw a guy who had two copying machines." Suffice to say that in the annals of Pentagon waste, superfluous photocopiers don't rank very high on the list.
BUSH+CHENEY+RUMSFELD KEEP PROVING GOP = CRAP
Even after they left office, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush just keep proving that the GOP is really more aptly named Communist Republican Anti-American Party (CRAP).
No wonder Limbaugh, Palin, Gingrich and Sanford are the new CRAP icons. They are at the top of the CRAP leader list because they have no honor, no integrity, and no morals, but they are perfect hatemongers and it must be admitted that their core constituency keep proving that there are far too many brain-dead crappers due to failed education and religious institutions that the former GOP destroyed during the last eight years, and counting.
Rumsfeld, the poetry-writing bonehead
Under IG BushCo, we saw defense spending levels rise to the level of the surreal. And, it'll probably happen again, some time down the line, because people are who they are, they do what they do, and one thing they don't ever seem to get enough of is rockets and bombs and bombers and tanks and guns and so forth, and so on. Rumsfeld had personal conflicts of interest, to the tune of millions? Imagine my shock and awe. Maybe we can call him 'The Other Donald'. He can go around telling people he's in nookilurz, or something...with friends like Dick, Bush, and Donald, is it any wonder that the national debt ballooned as it did? Not really. Now what remains to be seen is if the Democrats, as led by Obama, will actually succeed in out-spending the Bush administration in fiat dollars on social programs...or wherever all that money actually ends up...which we will probably never know.
The only reform for it all is actual federal budget spending CUTS, as in, 'here's your $24.95, now don't say I never gave you anything', but the likelihood of that happening is somewhere between a flying saucer scooping you up and taking you to Burger King on their dime tomorrow and the planet cracking in half and spiraling into the sun. So, best advice is, don't hold your breath, DO save some of your own money, and don't rely on politicians to be honest. If they were, they wouldn't get hired to begin with, in most cases, I think.
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