Donald Rumsfeld: Hooked on Crackberries?

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Donald Rumsfeld has discovered the modern era, and, like any Internet evangelist, he is spreading the gospel of how the USA must get hip to "the Internets" to keep up with terrorist organizations. He said in a speech that "For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a 'five and dime' store in an eBay world."

Uh, we're at war, and instead of talking about troop levels or posing with one of those military maps with pushpins on them, the Secretary of Defense is talking about PR efforts and dropping references to eBay? Has he been adding to his collection of toy soldiers, or what? Blonde Sense notes that Rumsfeld is simply fulfilling Principle of Fascism Number 6: A controlled mass media. But his words should also be familiar to anyone who has been stuck in a long meeting at work, and the marketing dude who doesn't know how a product works thinks the real problem is that you're not selling it well enough.

We've all met this guy, right? He uses words that don't make sense, like "impactful," and he abuses the prefixes "extra" and "intra" at every opportunity. Oh, and every event can be lumped into an age - the "media age" or the "digital age." The vague balm of "communication" can solve every problem. Needless to say, this guy doesn't have any idea of how the product works or what is being sold, just that he needs to sell it. Remember, Rumsfeld is the man who brought us Nutrasweet, and he wasn't the one sitting in a lab making it. He obviously doesn't know how a war works, either. When he hears the word "campaign," he doesn't think about guns, points of entry, or exit strategies. He thinks about focus groups.

If Rumsfeld were a marketing professional, he's definitely the guy who throws around words without knowing what they mean. Range Life can see these types from a mile away, as he has apprently been looking at cover letters for a marketing gig, including such memorable lines as:

Responsible for deepening penetration of partners’ business units by identifying new channels to drive “beyond-the-box” revenues based on pay-for-performance models.

Okay, beyond the obvious sexual metaphors, what does that mean? What are you doing, buddy? I can only imagine how Rummy would work the Iraq War on a resume:

Responsible for leveraging impactful strategies upon the cerebral-based units of a Middle Eastern nation through the uses of PowerPoint presentations, Internets, flesh-penetrating devices, and distributed communication models across receptive segments of the population.

After Rummy's little talk about how the Pentagon isn't keeping up with eBay, I'd like to ask, "Are you running a war here, or are you setting up focus groups to figure out which Army uniforms are the least threatening?" Oh, well, I can console myself with the fact that Rummy would never be hired anywhere outside the government because he is only now discovering the grand "digital age."