Rumsfeld: Virgin For The Volcano

By Greg Palast

11/09/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Why doesn't George Bush just throw a virgin into a volcano? Or Dick Cheney? Or Lynn Cheney?

Well, someone's head had to roll -- not for our bloody defeat in Iraq, but for the GOP's defeat in the mid-terms.

Well, I'm not celebrating. I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that Donald Rumsfeld has been given the kiss-off. But let's get this straight: It wasn't Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell?

It wasn't Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Ms. Rice?

It wasn't Rumsfeld who declared that al-Qaida and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr Cheney?

Yes, Rumfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chickenhawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and tinker-toy Napoleon - but he didn't appoint himself Secretary of Defense.

Rummy's the puppet -- but the problem is the puppeteer.

President Bush is one lucky fella. I can imagine him today on the intercom with Cheney: "Well, pardner, looks like the game's up." And Cheney replies, "Hey, just hang Rummy out the window until he's taken all their ammo."

And the timing of this smells: The Rumsfeld sideshow premiers while the sulfurous fumes of a questionable vote count in Virginia suggests the President's party is pulling a fast one to keep control of the Senate.

Rather than gossip about the dunking of The Don, I'd rather focus on suspicious electoral arithmetic. In Virginia, only 7,000 votes separates the Democratic Senatorial candidate Jim Webb from incumbent Republican George Allen. Leading up to the election, the State of Virginia rejected more than 91,000 names submitted from voter drives, blocking their registrations. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School says that Virginia's methods of rejecting voters had a notably racial bias. Golly. Put the two numbers together -- the 91,000 citizens questionably barred from voting and the teeny-weeny Senate vote margin, and Virginia begins to look a lot like Florida on the Potomac.

The blockade of voters at the Virginia polling station doors followed on last year's promise of Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to mount a, "challenge to voter eligibility" in Virginia. Mehlman vowed, through an attack on the voter rolls, to "do whatever we can" to keep control of Virginia. And he did. Voters blocked (and other purged from voter rolls) received "provisional ballots." The state only counts about 15% of these.

You do the math and tell me who really won Virginia and the Senate.

And let's not talk about the Montana vote -- and we won't now that Rumsfeld's useless carcass has been thrown in front of the TV cameras.

I'm not buying it. Americans didn't end up in a Vietnam on the Tigris because of Rumsfeld's failure of command. The problem was, and is, the failure of Rumsfeld's Commander-in-Chief.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "Armed Madhouse."