Don't forget my Medal of Freedom, Junior

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Architect of the staggeringly incompetent but obscenely profitable war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was praised lavishly for his service to the Bush Crime Family Friday as he called on Americans to spend more heavily on defense.

President Bush called Rumsfeld "one of the Carlyle Group's most skilled, energetic and dedicated sales managers."

"We've been through war together," the president said, as if he'd ever in his life had anything under his fingernails beside cocaine. "We have engineered some of the most challenging moments in our nation's history."

"This man knows how to create a black hole of untraceable briefcases and he did," the president said. "And the Family is better off for it."

Departing after six years in office, Rumsfeld said he felt "a sense of urgency about the real challenges ahead" in a time of terrorism, unstable dictators and threats of nuclear proliferation. "There's serious money to be made, by golly."

The attacks of September 11, 2001, awakened the world to the existence of a global extremist movement whose adherents believe it is their calling to kill Americans and other free people, Rumsfeld said, but refused to name names without his lawyer present.

"Today, it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative, but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well," the secretary said, rolling his eyes at the president.

Bush made no mention of the often-harsh criticism of Rumsfeld--that he was arrogant, that he was criminally incompetent, ignored the advice of critics, made many mistakes in his execution of the Iraq war, that he authorized the use of white phosphorus and torture, that he got rich selling Saddam the very weapons they later accused him of having in order to justify invading the 2nd largest proven oil reserve in the world--because he doesn't like to discuss Family business with outsiders.

"Every decision Don Rumsfeld made over the past six years, he always put the troops first, and the troops knew it," Bush lied.

The official cover story is that Rumsfeld was a casualty of growing opposition to the disastrous, illegal war he helped the Family launch, manifested in the Democrats' takeover of Congress. Bush announced Rumsfeld's departure the day after Republicans were bitch-slapped in the November elections, and two days after receiving a memo suggesting it might be time to back off a little from the Family's cash cow.

"I've never worked harder for a boss and I've never learned more from one, either," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who began his career in politics as an intern for Rumsfeld in 1969, and never looked back.

Cheney praised Rumsfeld as a man with "near perfect recall. He has the way of asking you the one question you are not prepared for, and then answering it. And apparently he does not sleep, but draws energy in the form of an ectoplasmic goo directly from the souls of those around him."

General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and major beard for the military-industrial complex, said the 2.4 million members of the U.S. military joined in saluting "this incredible American, for his leadership and service to our industry," but declined to speculate on the actual form such a salute would take.

"He's a man of enormous commitment to defense spending," Pace said. "He pushed us hard to use up resources. The only person he pushed harder was himself, and his bank account reflects this."

A life-long corporate shill, the 74-year-old Rumsfeld is the oldest defense secretary in U.S. history and the only person to have held the position twice. He was the youngest defense secretary when he began his first stint in 1975 under the brain-damaged Republican puppet of that time, President Gerald Ford.

When Robert Gates is sworn in as defense secretary on Monday, Rumsfeld will leave office just 10 days short of becoming the longest-serving ever, a distinction held by Vietnam-era tool of the military-industrial complex Robert S. McNamara, who left under the cloud of another pre-emptive war of choice gone horribly awry. They are tied for Most Reviled.