What will you do?

One man's experience on meeting the man who coined phrases like 'known knowns and known unknowns': Don Rumsfield. Read full entry here.

On Thursday, February 26 I shared a bus stop with a major war criminal. Donald Rumsfeld was standing at my bus stop that morning as I waited to take my boy to school. I confronted him and couldn't control my anger. I had seen him once before walk by (his arm was in a sling then and he looked positively wizened, but this time he was hale and nattily dressed) but had been too flabbergasted to react. I wanted to be ready with something to say the next time, and had prepared myself, but couldn't stay on script past "You think you can show your face in public among decent people?". I became more vociferous and enraged the longer it went: mass murderer, traitor, torturer, rapist of children....In fact, from my first words, when I saw Rumsfeld don an impenetrable smirk I consciously took the tack of yelling and loudly indicating his presence to everyone else; I wanted to enlist their help (Aftewards it reminded me of the scene in "Marathon Man" where Olivier is accosted on the street). Dismayingly my gentle fellow citizens didn't intervene in any way, or were even outright hostile to me, although some people who witnessed the exchange from the bus comforted me afterwards, approvingly. Thankfully my kid was not overly disturbed, and seemed even cheerful after I explained that Rumsfeld is a wicked man who started a war, like Sauron or Saruman, but that he was not a danger to us. I'm frankly not positive about the latter assertion. Anyway, he did respond at a couple of points. One insidious tactic was to comment on my kid -- I don't remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that he would be messed up by having such a crazy father (I believe he said, but am not sure, "That kid is going to have a rough life"), which bait I took and responded, "He has to learn the difference between good and evil."

An Iraqi man cries as he runs past a burning car destroyed during an air strike in Baghdad, March 26, 2003.  At least 15 burnt corpses lay in a popular residential area of Baghdad, apparently killed in a U.S.-led bombing or missile raid on the Iraqi capital on Wednesday, Reuters Television correspondents said.  An Iraqi Information Ministry official said a strike on a busy market area had caused "many, many casualties". Here.