It's pretty bad if Rummy's a role model

Further supporting the notion that inability to react appropriately to opinionated speech is truly multi-cultural, U.S. military leaders are calling this cartoon by Tom Toles for the Washington Post "beyond tasteless" and "a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation and as a result have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds."

Actually, it's a critical depiction of the jackoffs in charge who put them in that position, specifically highlighting the dissonance of one of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's recent comments about how stretching the Army so thin that soldiers are returning for several tours in Iraq makes them "battle hardened," and therefore a better fighting force collectively.

When a reporter asked Rumsfeld for comment, he sucked it up and martyred himself alongside past leaders who suffered similar abuse at political cartoonists' pens, saying, "That's the way it is here. It comes with the territory, I guess is all I can say."

Notice that even Donald "Have you hugged a bomb today?" Rumsfeld can look at a cartoon portraying himself in a less than laudatory light and not call for dropping a daisy-cutter on the Post or lopping off a couple of Mr. Toles' limbs.

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece in this week's Time Magazine about this whole cartoon debacle, and made the apt and elegant point that "Freedom means learning to deal with being offended."

(And when it's in the same issue as an argument rationalizing the violent reaction because "Western politics" have caused more Muslim deaths than Muslims are responsible for causing, as if lower numbers are somehow less wrong, we need all the voices of maturity we can get.)

There are far, far worse things in the world than to be offended by something, because–assuming you don't pre-empt it by going out on a violent quest for mindless vengeance–it gets you thinking about who you are and what's important to you.

Take a lesson from Rumsfeld: If you're truly secure in your religion or political philosophy or self or what-have-you, let the heretics yap away in the peanut gallery. You don't have to care, respond, or even listen–it's not like you're accountable to them or anything. Oh, wait...