Oh, henny penny, Donald Rumsfeld died today at 88. I wrote a whole lot about him here back in the day. The Villagers just loved him to pieces and treated him like a rock star. And the right wingers and neocons thought he was just dreamy. They actually called him “Rumstud.”
I’m reminded of this by Midge Dector, the wife of Norman Podhoretz, the Godfather of neoconservatism. It still makes me groan to read it all these years later:
Midge Decter’s lovelorn paean to Don Rumsfeld may stand as the most unintentionally funny of all the over-the-top Bush years hagiography:
“He works standing up at a tall writing table, as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down”
This one never fails to make me laugh out loud:
Decter: What Rumsfeld’s having become an American sex symbol seems to say about American culture today is that the assault on men leveled by the women’s movement, having poisoned the normally delicate relations between men and women and thereby left a generation of younger women with a load of anxiety they are only now beginning to throw off, is happily almost over. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the term “stud” being applied to a man who has reached the age of 70 and will not too long from now be celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.
It’s hard to overestimate it all right.
The Podhoretz’s are America’s first family of neoconservatism, dysfunctional masculinity and world domination. It’s quite an achievement.
He was a menace for many, many years going all the way back to the Nixon years. The passing of that generation of Neocons, Kissingerian/Nixonian “realists” and right wing imperialists cannot come too soon. No, they weren’t like crazy MAGAs. They knew what they were doing and it was very bad.