Decline of Deviousness: Rumsfeld to Walker

The Daily Show offers an inadvertent seminar on the falling quality of public liars by juxtaposing a prank phone call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with Jon Stewart's interview of master obfuscator Donald Rumsfeld.

Granted that Walker is only a novice, Rumsfeld never would have been taken in by a journalist posing as a powerful backer. Even as a Congressional factotum in the Eisenhower days, he was Mr. Smooth.

Now, he is still lying with a straight face to an uncharacteristically flummoxed Stewart about the "selling" of the Iraq War, hiding behind Colin Powell's UN presentation.

As a polite inquisitor, the Daily Show host failed to counter with Powell's own misgivings and eventually expressed regrets about putting his popularity on the line with deceptive "intelligence" from Rumsfeld's Defense Department. ("You've got high poll ratings," Dick Cheney had told the General, "you can afford to lose a few points.")

Now, as he makes the rounds selling his memoirs, Rumsfeld is only a shadow of the former arrogant figure at press conferences (often wrong but never in doubt), the public face of the Bush Administration's conduct of a needless war until he was dumped after the 2006 elections.

If Scott Walker intends to follow in his footsteps, he has a lot to learn about butt-covering along the way. If he got a "phone call" from one of the Koch brothers, whose $35 billion wealth has "repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government and on the Obama Administration in particular," Walker should have had his staff take a return number and check it out before calling back.

That's what Rummy would have done.