The Constitution, Such a Pain in the Ass

I am reading Newsweek's excerpt from Bob Woodwards's new book, "State of Denial".

In the excerpt, Woodward describes Rumsfeld's frustration at what he termed the "Anchor Chain" mentality at the Pentagon. In other words, Rumsfeld wanted changes, big changes. He wrote in 2001,

The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late.

He isn't entirely incorrect in his assessment. But his approach to it was all wrong. This is part of what became known as the "Anchor Chain Memo" where Rumsfeld was laying out his idea of "transformation". What I can derive from this is the result. Contractors. Obviously, since the Pentagon was chained to its anchor, you get around that by privatizing. So we are forced to contract our work to a private firm. But guess what? The private firm doesn't really know how to do our job. So we have review their work, check, and fix it. So the government pays twice for the same thing rather than fixing its own problematic regulations, which is really a more sustainable solution. Go figure.

But here is the more shocking thing Woodward reveals. On May 1, 2006, Rumsfeld circulated a 6 page memo proposing some fixes for the mess he had created with this attempts at "transformation". This memo was called, "Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches" (title makes no sense in English). Still deeply frustrated by the Pentagon bureaucracy (which has only gotten worse with Rummy at the helm), he wrote that not only was the DoD tangled in its anchor chain, so was the whole government, the whole world. He wrote,

"The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible."

Yeah, I guess all those Constitutional limitations, like checks and balances are a real bureaucratic drag.

He later says in a interview with Woodward,

We're facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands . . . they're different than our Congress understands. They're different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope with and deal with. We are dealing with enemies that can turn inside our decision circles. . . . They [the enemy] don't have parliaments and bureaucracies and real estate to defend and interact with or deal with or cope with. They can do whatever they want. They aren't held accountable.

Wa wa. I don't see anyone holding Rummy (I could do a whole post on his poor English and tendency toward redundancy) accountable for anything. I don't see a Congress getting in his way. How can they? They are incompetent in his book and can be ignored.

Call me crazy, but, reading between the lines, it seems Rummy would be an advocate of dissolving of our current system of government and replacing it with a new one (like say, the type they have in Iraq). The man is a megalomaniac.

Bush must be impeached and he and his administration tried for treason.