Can we truly afford the luxury of thinking clearly?

Heavens no! According to Field Marshal Rumsfeld, who plays rhetorical Jeopardy on the op-ed pages of the LA Times:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?

• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?

• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America--not the enemy-- is the real source of the world's troubles?

Shorter Rummy: "Can we truly afford to face reality?" The answer to all, is, of course not. After all of the wasteful, pointless wars and the tax cuts for the rich, we can't afford anything--especially keeping these lunatics in charge.

Rummy is also PO'd at Amnesty International:

Then there is the case of Amnesty International, a long-respected human-rights organization, which called the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times"--a reference to the vast system of Soviet prisons and labor camps where innocent citizens were starved, tortured and murdered. The facility at Guantanamo Bay, by contrast, includes a volleyball court, basketball court, soccer field and library (the book most requested is "Harry Potter"). The food, served in accordance with Islamic diets, costs more per detainee than the average U.S. military ration.

AI has now issued this correction: "We apologize for referring to Guantanamo Bay as 'the gulag of our times.' It is, rather, the never-ending summer camp from hell. We apologize to Secretary Rumsfeld and all the other idiots who think that volleyball courts and Harry Potter make up for having your freedom deprived for four and a half years without due process, and without one's family even knowing where you are."

Sarcasm aside, AI clearly intended the "gulag" comment to refer to the lack of legal recourse for the "detainees," not to the particulars of their confinement:

Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law.