Rumsfeld and "Honor"

Neo-con theorist Kenneth Adelman, on a conversation with Donald Rumsfeld, to The New Yorker:

"What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, 'What's the alternative? Because what we're doing now is just losing.'"

He said Rumsfeld did not take the assessment well.

"He was in deep denial -- deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did 15 or 20 minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can't lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, 'Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.' He got upset and cut me off. He said, 'Excuse me,' and went right on with it."

Enter Rumsfeld as Falstaff:

Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what
is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so
ends my catechism.

Then & Now

George W. Bush, after the 2004 Presidential election:

"Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."

George W. Bush, after the 2006 Midterm election:

"Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?"