My mother calls and tells me to put on CNN. (I’d rather not, but I humor her. She’s like a spoiled 7 year old these days. Except that she’s not; she’s my mother and still wants to act like I’m the one who’s seven. Bleh!)
On CNN, Rumsfeld is “Rallying the Troops,” talking to them as though they were 7 years old, playing the good ‘ol boy, playing to the good ol’ boys among them. Only they’re not all stunted minds. Some are asking intelligent questions about what their lives as soldiers are going to be like now in both the Big Picture and Little Picture. (After all, Rumsy IS Secretary of Defense; if anyone should have those answers, he should.) But, as Rumsy himself said he would do, he “responds” rather than “answers,” aiming jokes about his lack of “diplomacy” to the least common denominator in the crowd and getting just the cheers he expects. He repeats the lines, the lies, that he’s been throwing out to cheering crowds all along: the Iraqis love us, we are their liberators, their heroes etc. He doesn’t really answer any questions, and no one even bothers to ask the ones (listed by myrln in a comment to the previous post) that he and Bush insisted were the ones that would be answered by this war.
— Where is bin Laden?
— Where is the anthrax mailer?
— Where are the WMDs?
— Where is Saddam?
No answers. Not even any Rumsy Responses.
Meanwhile, Salon.com confronts the lies.
This from here:
Before the war, the Bush administration said the weapons existed and we would find them. Now, it’s saying maybe we won’t find them after all — and the rest of the world smells a rat. …..despite months of reassuring Americans that WMD would be found (including most recently earlier this month, when Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer called the weapons “what this war was about”) the administration seems to be preparing the country for news of evidence that WMD once existed in Iraq — with no actual WMD — and calling it a victory.
And this from here:
Forget truth. That is the message from our government and its apologists in the media who insist that the Iraq invasion is a great success story even though it was based on a lie. …..That claim of urgency — requiring us to short-circuit the U.N. weapons inspectors — has proved to be a whopper of a falsehood. Late Sunday, the U.S. Army conceded that what had been reported as its only significant WMD find — two mobile chemical labs and a dozen 55-gallon drums of chemicals — “showed no positive hits at all” for chemical weapons.
But there’s Rumsy on CNN playing the troops and playing the fool. And all the seven-year-old minds continue to cheer, including my mother.