Peggy Noonan has a nice paen to Don Rumsfeld in today’s Opinion Journal. She makes the valid point that the recruiting ads for the military are too focused on things like learning skills and pay, and other material benefits and other oh-so-90s attributes, when enticing the nation’s youth to join up. They don’t talk about more gut issues like love of country.

She’s right. Post 911, they need to redo some of their focus group market research, and retune their marketing campaign (if it’s not semi-oxymoronic to talk about a marketing campaign to serve your country…)

But I have a quibble. She says:

…he seems, as leaders go, a natural. Much has been written about his skills, and though the amount of interest being paid to him is inevitable–he’s a WASP wartime consigliere, an interesting thing in itself- -a lot of it misses the point.

Peggy, Peggy, Peggy….

A man with a name like “Rumsfeld,” a WASP? Sorry, Margaret, but Rumsfeld is not an anglo-saxon name. Don’s a kraut. The German “feld” is probably “field.” I’m not sure what “rums” would mean. Maybe it means that he comes from a people who drank sugar-derived hooch out in a field. I’m sure that my faithful readers, who are much smarter and better informed than I, particularly in matters Germanic, will correct me in short order.

Anyway, despite the whining that’s coming from the diluted former warmongers in Germany and the rest of the Continent, I think we’re in good hands with a guy like that as head of our defense department right now. I schedule my days around his press conferences, when he masterfully and entertainingly shows the Pentagon press corps to be a confederacy of dunces, on a daily basis.