

#FollowFriday has come early: Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration's lightning rod of a defense secretary, is on Twitter.

No one would ever confuse Rumsfeld with a technophobe. In office, he threw money at high-tech weaponry and gear, to the point where it jeopardized the Iraq war. But this latest move for the aggressive septuagenarian isn't just recreational: Rumsfeld's using online media to rehab his battered image.

Rumsfeld – or a member of his entourage – joined Twitter at 9:24 a.m. EDT as @RumsfeldOffice. After two hours and three tweets, he was up to 385 followers. The first 29 tweeps he's opted to follow include Politico, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, GOP consigliere Karl Rove, and the military services' feeds.

By the time I finished writing this paragraph, another eight people started following Rummy. Others are tracking a more, um, colorful feed, @RealDonRumsfeld.

In addition to the new Twitter account, Rumsfeld's started a Facebook page, with wall posts dating back to Sept. 21, sharing interviews he's done or articles written about him. (I'm one of 55 people who Like This.

You can check out three photographs of Rumsfeld and his wife smiling with young Central Asian strivers whom their foundation sponsors. Speaking of, the Rumsfeld Foundation also launched its website today, continuing the full-spectrum Rumsfeldian campaign of dominance for the online and social media spheres.

All this helps prime the pump for the Jan. 25 release of Known And Unknown, Rumsfeld's long-awaited memoir. The book itself appears to be an experiment in online disclosure: Rumsfeld's aide Keith Urbahn recently told Politico's Ben Smith that it'll be supplemented by "the release of thousands of pages of never-before-seen memos and previously classified documents that put the reader in the moment."

In other words, expect snowflakes. (It's worth mentioning that Rumsfeld's first undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, did the same thing with his own memoir.)

If all that seems like online-media overkill, Rumsfeld has years – if not a lifetime – of negative publicity to overcome. Most recently, Gen. Hugh Shelton, a former Joint Chiefs chairman, wrote in his recent memoir that Rumsfeld possessed the "worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service" – obstinate, dismissive, impatient with other points of view.

A group of other retired generals demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in 2006. While their stated reasoning concerned the morass of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld had spent six years angering many officers, especially in the Army and Marine Corps, with his "net-centric" ideas for light, fast, networked war, which helped capture Baghdad in three weeks and then proved insufficient to pacify Iraq.

From the perspective of the public at large, there was also that time when Rumsfeld told TV cameras that he knew where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were.

Now that Rumsfeld's in the fray of social media, maybe he'll answer questions directly from curious tweeps and Facebook wall-crawlers. Urbahn telegraphed Smith that Rumsfeld's memoir is characteristically feisty: "The book will tell readers things that they didn't know, and it may well unsettle a few people who think the history of certain events has already been written." Flame wars have resulted from less than that.

Photo: U.S. Northern Command

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