BREAKING: General Eric K. Shinseki to be Veterans Secretary

By GottaLaff

CNN just broke that General Eric Shinseki will be announced by President-elect Obama tomorrow, as his next Secretary of Veterans Affairs .

He's the very same four-star general who got canned because he correctly called out BushCo when he said, "'something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers' would probably be required for post-war Iraq."

UPDATE: When I said "canned" above, I should mention that I didn't mean that literally:

Shinseki retired in the summer of 2003, shortly after the fall of Baghdad. Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz attended his farewell ceremony.

He "retired". Meantime, look who left with him:

Notably Shinseki led the Army at the same time that Obama's nominee as national security adviser, then-Marine commandant Gen. James L. Jones. Both questioned Wolfowitz's presumptions, before the war in Iraq commenced, about how the fighting would go, and they argued that Pentagon planning was being too optimistic and should prepare thoroughly for worst-case scenarios.

The politics around the planned nomination are intriguing. Shinseki has maintained a near-total silence since leaving the Pentagon. However, earlier this year, a letter he wrote to Rumsfeld in June 2003 leaked. In it, Shinseki criticized Rumsfeld for not letting the Joint Chiefs of Staff "express their best military judgment as often as they should." He also said that the way Rumsfeld and other top civilian officials ran meetings was "unhelpful."

I can't imagine what he's talking about. Rummy helped him, alright... right out the door.