If there was ever a subject for the Sunday shows, certainly this is it.
By Kevin Drum’s count there are seven cabinet secretaries now left standing. Four of them are at second-tier posts (Interior, Labor, HUD and VA) and another, Treasury Secretary Snow, is just (briefly) being kept around for humiliation value — like the goofy kid in the club whose role and utility is to provide a ready target for the application of wedgies.
And that leaves Don Rumsfeld who, according to this report tonight on CNN, is not only still standing, but will keep standing probably for the rest of the Bush presidency …
The official said the president asked Rumsfeld, 72, to stay during a weekly meeting on Monday because the nation is at war and he is the best person for the job. Rumsfeld has said he wants to finish his reforms at the Pentagon and continue overseeing the Iraq war and that country’s hoped-for transformation.
And of all these <$Ad$>people — Powell, Ashcroft, Paige, Abraham, Thompson, Veneman, Evans — does any of them hold a candle to Don Rumsfeld when it comes to the number of screw-ups, debacles and disasters that have happened on his watch?
I mean, it’s not even close, is it?
One criticism of the president that loomed large in the last election — and not just among Democrats but with many Republicans too — was that this president either does not recognize or will not admit mistakes. And whichever it was, there was no accountability for them. In most cases those ‘mistakes’ people were talking about were ones under Rumsfeld’s purview. And he would seem to be the only one — certainly the only one of the principals — that the president insists on keeping in place.
In this administration, the buck may not stop at the Oval Office, but the hard line against accountability sure does start there.
