Can the words “As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.” not be followed by these. “The president has therefore accepted my resignation.”?
It seems an offence against grammar that they were not, as if the meaning of “responsibility” had simply been abolished and when Rumsfeld spoke of “reponsibility” he was in fact using an Azerbaijani term for boiled sweets, which just happened to be a homonym for the English word.
It reminds me of the time when a Soviet-era poet was jailed for seven years for foul crime of denying that freedom of speech existed in the Soviet Union. Destroying the meaning of “democracy” seems to me much less serious than destroying the meaning of “responsibility”. Plenty of fairly decent societies have functioned without much democracy. In the end, perhaps, democracy is largely a mechanism for forcing the powerful to take responsibility. But no society is worth defending — no society is even a society — where “responsibility” means nothing at all, and where a man can keep his job after admitting full responsibility for photographs like this:
U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.
I ask again: in what dungeon dimension can you take “full responsibility” for the video’ed rape of young boys and still be retained in office?