According to Donald Rumsfeld, if you didn’t want to hand your whole life over to ruthless megalomanics to be chewed on and tossed out like the straw in your chocolate McShake, then you shouldn’t have signed up for the military. What did you think you’d be doing anyway, serving your country? Puh-lese.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Saturday praised the work of an Army brigade whose one-year tour in Iraq was extended just as they prepared to return home, and said he saw no reason for the soldiers or their families to be angry at him.

“These people are all volunteers. They all signed up. They all are there doing what they’re doing because they want to do it.”

“I don’t put it in that context,” he said. “These people are all volunteers. They all signed up. They all are there doing what they’re doing because they want to do it.”

And don’t start whining about coming home by 2007, either.

Rumsfeld said he would make no promises that the full brigade would be back home by the holidays.

“I’d love to be Santa Claus. I’m not,” he said in an interview with reporters during a flight to Fairbanks.

If it turned out that by December, U.S. commanders in Iraq felt they needed an unscheduled infusion of troops, “our first choice obviously would be to have them be someone other than the people we just extended,” Rumsfeld said. “But I’m not going to get into the promises business. That isn’t my style.”

What is your style, exactly, Rummy? Besides dunderheaded incompetence and cold-blooded apathy, I mean.