Cackles from the Balcony

Eric has called my attention to the latest belabored battlefield meditation from Donald Rumsfeld. In response to the plainspoken question "are we winning the war?” our Defense Secretary proposed the following intriguing little intellectual exercise:

"The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency. So, therefore, winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the word 'winning' and 'losing' in a war. The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis."

I think this little discursive pretzel should certainly have culminated in a Keyesian flourish of “It’s geometric!” but one cannot have everything. Rumsfeld’s statement was, of course, far too typical to be remarkable on its own. But it is the panic-stricken effort at damage control attempted immediately thereafter by the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, that has elicited today’s Cackles from the Balcony.

After Rumsfeld had finished his abstract meditation (by the way, for casualties imposed and dollars wasted in the ongoing hideous Iraqi debacle, simply glance leftward at the figures available and constantly updated there), Myers immediately interjected, with all the grace of a frog leg convulsing at the touch of a live wire, "I'm going to say this: I think we are winning, OK? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."

I really must agree with Eric’s own assessment of this one: "I think we've been winning for some time." Instant. Classic.