In an interview with Fox News last night, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — one of the key architects of the Iraq disaster — was asked whether he currently “pays attention to specifics about what’s going on day to day in Iraq.”

Rumsfeld responded by claiming it’s impossible to follow events when you’re “on the outside.” He then added that he doesn’t have time to follow what’s going on in Iraq because he’s too busy with administrative tasks:

I’ve been very busy doing a series of things: setting up an office and hiring staff, arranging my papers to give to the Library of Congress, setting up a new foundation…

Rumsfeld re-emphasized the point, concluding his answer by stating: “So I’ve been busy doing those kinds of things and I have not even attempted stay as current as one would if you were in the government, constantly seeing all the intelligence and information.” Watch it:

The Hoover Institution recently announced that Rumsfeld would join the think tank as an “ideology and terror expert.” Rumsfeld has previously announced he is working on setting up a new foundation for the next generation of Donald Rumsfelds to study and grow. He is also in the process of authoring a book and was reportedly shopping it around in the hopes of receiving a “large cash advance.”

Book publishers had expressed “tepid interest” in a Rumsfeld memoir that talked about his six years under Bush. The New York Post reported Rumsfeld was re-tooling the book, and “he now plans to make it a full-blown autobiography rather than simply a treatment of his six years in the cabinet.” Asked if he was writing a book, Rumsfeld told Fox News:

I might. I’m thinking about it. A lot of people are urging me to do it. I’ve not made a decision. If I did, it would not be a quick-and-dirty thing, and the money from it, I would put into the foundation that I’ve just established — in the process of establishing.

It would probably be a memoir that would run the full span, back through the Depression and World War II and my life as opposed to the last 15 minutes.

Rumsfeld has too many things on his plate to worry about the catastrophe he helped create in Iraq.

I’m on hold as we speak for a conference call with what Hillary Clinton’s campaign is promising will be a significant new endorser.

UPDATE: It’s Wesley Clark, which is what my smarter-than-me friends said last night.

UPDATE II: This seems pretty significant to me, at least in the little corner of the universe where I operate. There’s obviously a lot of admiration for General Clark among the netroots, both as someone who’s engaged with bloggers over the years, and as someone who’s shown sound judgment on Iraq. Thus far, the endorsement from the national security world that HRC has wracked up have had a slightly double-edged-sword quality to them, the sort of thing likely to make me cluck about Very Serious People and so forth. Clark’s not like that, and he’s making the case that she not only has sound views on Iraq looking forward, but also the experience and judgment necessary to operate in what’s necessarily going to be a difficult situation.

UPDATE III: Bottom-line, Clark didn’t say anything earth-shattering (though he did make the point that the president, in his or her national security role, needs to tackle an extremely broad range of issues beyond Iraq and that he’s most confident that Clinton is prepared to take on all of those challenges) but it’s a useful reminder/signal/whatever that a President Clinton would, in fact, expand her circle of foreign policy thinkers beyond the group of hawks who was with her in 2002-2003 and looked set to be the dominant influence in a Clinton administration.