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.

Interesting that Noonan got that point wrong, about Rumsfeld being a W.A.S.P. Many people make that mistake partly because most don't know what W.A.S.P. means and think it is just another word for white.

What grates me is that he (Rumsfeld) and I are both classed by the state as "Caucasian". This catch all term is for everyone from Caucases west, except for whineing groups who now get hyphen names. (Irish-American, Italo-American et al) At least calling someone "white" was more descriptive than "caucasian". As if a Celt, a Greek, a Icelander and someone for Lisbon all look the same!

White Anglo Saxon Protestant does not exclude Germans. Angles and Saxons came from Germany to Kick Celtic Butt in th emiddle of the first millenium. This they did so well that there are very very few linguistics elements that refer back to the early Celtic aspect of English history. The name for the river in London (Thames)is the example everyone uses to prove the rule.

Feld? He's Dutch, I think.

But does it matter?

My only sticking point with Noonan's article was that she harps on the Army's recruiting campaign without mentioning whether she has ever explained to her son the value of military service to his country. Military service has long been out of fashion, and still is seen by many of the intelligentsia as beneath the educated class. In some schools recruiters are barred from entering the campus How many kids have someone in their family that they can ask about military service? For their parents, military service was downplayed, and doing something "for your country" was a laughable idea. Most of my new soldiers are proud to serve their country, but it wasn't the first thing on their minds when they enlisted.