SEMI-HIJACK!
I'm too shallow for any poetry except nonsense and found poetry.
So how about a shitload o' found poetry:
From the book Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, compiled by Hart Seely. All taken verbatim from Rumsfeld press conferences and interviews.
A lot of these would make good Talking Heads lyrics. "Don't Worry About the Government" indeed.
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Glass Box
You know, it's the old glass box at the—
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's—
And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But—
Some of you are probably too young to remember those—
Those glass boxes,
But—
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
A Confession
Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.
Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
The Digital Revolution
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.
Clarity
I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.
Needless to Say
Needless to say,
The president was correct
Whatever it was he said.
Balloons and Music
You saw what happened in Afghanistan
The people went out in the streets,
And they were joyous
And they had balloons
And they played music
And they welcomed the U.S.
Because everyone knows
The United States does not want to occupy Iraq.
Unanimity
Now,
Is there unanimity?
No.
Did anyone ever expect unanimity?
No.
Life isn't like that.
Man and Wife, Talking at Dawn
My wife Joyce is here.
Every once in awhile
In the morning
As I get up about 5 o'clock
And get ready to take a shower
And head for the office,
She says, "Don, where is he?"
I tell her that
If I want to bring up
Osama bin Laden
I'll wake her up
And bring it up myself.
Central Question
It's awfully hard to know
In fact, it's impossible to know,
Unless one just speculates.
I don't know how many people
Who live in an exceedingly repressive regime
Actually like it.
Cheating Woman
She said she had a question
And she asked three
I asked for an easy one
And she gave me a tough three.
Flying, Too
Now that is not always true.
Think of the B fifty-two.
It's still flying just fine, thank you.
And so am I... thank you.
Gerbil
I feel like a gerbil
I get on that thing
And I run like hell.
On Walking Towards a Wall
If you're walking towards a wall
And you decide you want to go to the opposite wall,
The sooner you make the correction,
The easier it is.
If you wait until you're right face up against the wall,
Then you've got to make a sharp turn
Polls
Opinion polls go up and down,
They spin like weather vanes.
They're interesting, I suppose.
I don't happen to look.
Chasing the Chicken
If you're chasing the chicken
Around the chicken yard
And you don't have him yet,
And the question is, how close are you?
The answer is, it's tough to characterize
Because there's lots of zigs and zags.
Evasion Haiku
I'm working my way
Over to figuring out
How I won't answer.
Doing the Doable
What we are doing
Is that which is doable
In the way we're currently doing it.
In Command
A government is
Governing or it's not. And
If not, someone else is.
They Know Nothing
Anyone who knows anything isn't talking
And anyone with any sense isn't talking.
Therefore:
The people that are talking to the media,
By definition, people who don't know anything,
And people who don't have a hell of a lot of sense.
Not Well
We're not doing that well,
And of course, the reason is
It's not an even playing field.
We're a democracy
And they're a dictatorship.
So they control their ground,
And they manage the press,
And they lie repeatedly.
And we don't manage the press,
We don't lie -
No, we don't at all.
Rules
Anything that I say
That I shouldn't have
Is off the record
I want you to
understand that
Right now, up front.
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