Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Care to flip-flop Mr. Rumsfeld?

I was just watching a Frontline documentary called "Rumsfeld's War" when up cropped a fantastic quote from Don the do-wrong-wrong. It comes from his April 11, 2003 Pentagon briefing:

I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest, and it just was "Henny-Penny, the sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it.

And here is a country that's being liberated. Here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator and they're free. And all this newspaper could do with eight or 10 headlines -- they showed a man bleeding, a civilian who they claimed we had shot, one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country.

Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.

Hundreds of US and thousands of Iraqi lives later, I wonder if he'd care to make that kind of statement again and not be laughed out of office? Just who is it that trusted him then when he made this comment that still trusts him now? Why does anyone wonder why over 50% of Americans don't trust "Bush and the New Cons" (aka NeoCons) to run this country and the vast majority of the rest of the world are actually paying careful interest in our little game of democracy-come-mediocracy?

I've heard from two Americans recently who had traveled to Spain and Germany and were both shocked at how much interest there was in who the next president would be and how overwhelmingly they were against Bush being that person. Its time for America to get its head out of the sand (or out of its ass) and take a sniff of reality.

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