Donald Rumsfeld's Snowflake Memos: Exhorting DOD Employees to Lie on a Massive Scale on a Daily Basis

The old saying tells us that no two snowflakes look alike. It's not true, of course, but even that demythologizing doesn't excuse the astonishing inappropriateness of the term given to the memos that were sent from by former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to Defense Department employees. Those people have termed the memos-some of which arrived in the numbers of 60 a day-that Donald Rumsfeld sent while disastrously managing the war in Iraq snowflakes became Rumsfeld sent the memos so often that they fell like the white stuff. What did these memos contain?

Well, what they didn't contain was any brilliant insight into how to successfully wage a war against an enemy without an army. Rumsfeld's memos were also singularly lacking in inspiration rhetoric designed to lift the sagging spirits of those who saw clearly the devastation that Rumsfeld left in his wake, but were powerless to stop. No, what Rumsfeld apparently spent several hours each and every day doing in his role as America's Secretary of Defense was writing memos that contained such instructions as making it vital that everyone in the Defense Department do everything they could to link Iraq to Iran despite the fact that no evidence existed to back up those claims. Or that they exhort the dangers of political extremism that Americans faced from such juggernauts of power as Somalia and The Philippines. Just like Dick Cheney apparently feels his job as Vice President entails forcing intelligence agents to find truths that simply don't exist, Donald Rumsfeld's idea of the job of Secretary of Defense seemed to include being a cheerleader for the phantom menace that justifies unconstitutional behavior by the President. The memos that Rumsfeld put out on a daily basis paint a portrait of a man so busy rallying the Defense Department officials to scare the fucking Jesus out of America that it is no wonder his management of the war will go down in history as perhaps the single worst job ever done by anyone in the position of waging war. Rumsfeld's ineptitude makes whoever his French counterpart was during World War II look like Napoleon. Now we know why. Rumsfeld was so busy writing his memos that focused on making Americans so confused and frightened that he probably made every decision regarding management of the war when he was in the toilet, crapping out large chunks of fecal matter that could have done the job infinitely better.

Americans deserves so much better than the men and women that Pres. Bush has routinely appointed to positions that they simply were not intellectually or politically prepared for. From Alberto Gonzales-the Attorney General who wasn't even qualified to judge a beauty pageant-to Condi Rice, the Secretary of State who just now decided that the Bush legacy in the Middle East will be peace in Palestine (she does hail from Mars, right?) it has been just one miserable failure after another. It didn't seem possible, but Gonzales has actually made Ed Meese almost look like an effective Attorney General.

But none of Bush's ill-conceived appointments will go down in history as a bigger mistake that Donald Rumsfeld. We always knew Rumsfeld possessed an arrogance that was based entirely on accomplishments that existed only in his deranged mind, but we now have proof that his tenure as Sec. of Defense consisted mainly of making sure that Americans were so scared and misinformed that it wouldn't matter he was the single worst person possible to occupy his position. The snowflakes memos are, now that I think about it, a very apt description. Even if it is not true that no two snowflakes are identical and even if it is true that almost all of Rumsfeld's memos were identical, what Rumsfeld's urges to his underlings to lie on a grand scale do have in common with snowflakes is that eventually both melt away and disappear.

The difference, however, is that Rumsfeld's legacy of urging his employees to lie on a grand scale did not end with the Defense Department. So far, it appears that until they leave, there isn't one single person working in the Bush administration who is capable of telling the truth.