If you read the paper most everyday like I do, in your own mind you can come to fancy yourself something of a universe master. Something can go big and surprisingly wrong but to you it seems logical - because you can see the developing evidence in your daily paper looking backward. ( I stopped time once, watching Kuwait invasion on TV at bar, while reading day's paper with previous day's news of possible armed buildup on border (and night before was reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which begins in Kuwait.) So I understand Donald Rumsfeld, the Donald Rumsfeld who stars in a major motion picture known as the Unknown Known.
I call Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknown' wordsmithing ridiculously sublime because, upon viewing Errol Morris' film, I conclude that Rumsfeld willfully misunderstood what he chose to. Abbot and Costello had the St.Louis team, and Rumsfeld and Chaney had Pearl Harbor.
The seven-year War secretary's 'understanding' of the Pearl Harbor lesson was more 'misunderstanding' – was more a confabulation of scientific analytics. He took a bit of truth and with some demented technical exactitude mis-applied it to the case of Iraq and its purported troves of weapons of mass destruction.
He took the idea that the Pearl Harbor debacle was caused by failure of imagination, and imagined a fabled debacle all his own. Prediction provides some very special care, evoking a rework of Bob Dylan line: "To live outside of time you must be honest." - Jack Vaughan
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