September 5th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
I am sure those of you that are regular readers here know that Don “Corleone” Rumsfeld isn’t one of my favorite figures in King George’s court but a plan by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee revealed in Time Magazine smells like more time wasting rhetoric to me.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tells TIME that his party will strike back by trying to force a vote of no-confidence in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the next few weeks. “They want to play games; we’ll meet them on a very real thing. We’re going to deal with Don Rumsfeld’s stewardship. Everybody but one person comes to the conclusion that it has been a total disaster, and that’s Mr. Decider himself” — a sarcastic allusion to the President.
Rumsfeld is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the current administration but what exactly are the Democrats going to accomplish by this purely symbolic measure? Will it change the minds of the Bush kool-aid drinkers? Will it push King George into relieving Rummy from his post? Of course the answer to these questions is no so how about you guys just get on with the business of working on the issues that really matter like say immigration reform and our security. But I guess when it comes to election year politics that is asking a bit too much.
September 4th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
Glenn Greenwald writing over at firedoglake had a very interesting interview with John Dean, the author of Conservatives Without Conscience, that I would recommend everyone read. One of Dean’s comments that stood out to me dealt with Donald Rumsfeld when he first came to the Nixon White House back in 1970.
Rumsfeld came to the Nixon White House in 1970 some five months after I arrived. At the time, I asked White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman what Rummy was going to be doing. “Nothing,” Haldeman told me, explaining that they were placing him on the White House staff (giving him a sinecure) to bolster his chances to win a Senate race in IL.
In time, Haldeman — not to mention — Nixon came to distrust Rumsfeld. Many thought Nixon appointed him Ambassador to NATO as a promotion. In fact, they wanted to get him out of the White House. Haldeman called Rumsfeld “slimy” in his contemporaneous diaries, and Nixon is heard on his tapes discussing Rumsfeld in less than flattering terms.
Most ironic, given Rumsfeld’s current position on Iraq, Rumsfeld argued that Nixon should get the hell out of Vietnam. Rummy was a cut and run guy back then.
It gives an interesting perspective on how the guy that is preaching the “stay the course” line in Iraq now felt during the Vietnam War not to mention the lack of trust he earned during his early years in the Nixon Administration.
August 29th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
It seems Don “Corleone” Rumsfeld is unhappy and thinks that terrorists are manipulating the media to influence those of us in the West.
“That’s the thing that keeps me up at night,” he said during a question-and-answer session with about 200 naval aviators and other Navy personnel at this flight training base for Navy and Marine pilots.Rumsfeld was asked whether the criticism he draws as Pentagon chief and a leading advocate of the war in Iraq is an impediment to performing his job. He said it was not and he knows from history that wars are normally unpopular with many Americans. “I expect that,” he said. “I understand that.”
“What bothers me the most is how clever the enemy is,” he continued, launching an extensive broadside at Islamic extremist groups which he said are trying to undermine Western support for the war on terror.
“They are actively manipulating the media in this country” by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
“They can lie with impunity,” he said, while U.S. troops are held to a high standard of conduct.
So his belief that the media is being manipulated by terrorists is what keeps him up at night and not the fact that under his leadership, we have been bogged down in an untenable occupation plagued by poor planning that has led to the death of over 2500 US servicemen not to mention the 10’s of thousand of civilian deaths?
I also noticed he didn’t show any outrage over the media manipulation that Bush and Co. used to justify the war in the first place. Anyone seen any of those WMD’s that administration used as the reason for the invasion in the first place? How about that nice little photo-op with King George on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring mission accomplished 1216 days ago?
Sorry Don, I don’t think too many people other than yourself will be laying awake at night worrying about media manipulation, worry over their loved ones put in harms way by your failed policies maybe…