Above: Angry villagers chase the frightened and confused Rumsfeldstein out of town.
The first casualty of the election: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is resigning, effective immediately.
Less than a week ago, George W. Bush said that he hoped that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would serve in his administration through the end of his second term. "Both those men are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them," Bush said in an interview.
Now the president says that he's had "a series of thoughtful conversations" with Rumsfeld, and that the two of them "agreed" that the "time is right for new leadership at the Pentagon." At a White House press conference going on now, Bush all but conceded that he misled reporters who asked him about Rumsfeld last week. "The reason was that I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of the campaign," he said. "The only way ... to get you on to another question was to give you that answer." More here.
Andrew Sullivan
Watching the president's press conference, we have finally gotten to see what happens when George W. Bush is forced to face reality. It wasn't pretty. He was prickly from the word go, defensive, and also revealing. He was trying to say (I think) that he had already decided to fire Rumsfeld last week, even as he was insisting that Rummy would stay for two more years. So Bush's own spin is that he was lying through his teeth last week. Good to have that confirmed in his own words.
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