Rumsfeld a great SECDEF? Somebody beam me up! I'm trapped in a strange, upside down world of make believe on the Planet of the Apes...help!
Posted on 12/07/2006 6:50:53 AM PST by george76
One day in the next two weeks there will be a departure ceremony at the Pentagon. Flags will fly, bands will play and the liberal media will calumniate.
Should the president choose to add the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the other honors rendered, it's entirely possible that some newsrooms will have to bring in trauma therapists.
The 527 Media will indulge themselves in one last feeding frenzy over the man they love to hate, Donald Rumsfeld.
Mr. Rumsfeld will probably walk out of the Pentagon smiling at the thought of a job well done.
His tenure has been colored by an onslaught of media attacks, but Rumsfeld knows that American history is enriched by men who suffered the same treatment at the hands of the press and were later judged to be some of our greatest leaders.
Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln endured appalling media attacks throughout the Civil War (Lincoln the incompetent baboon, Grant the drunk, Sherman the crazy man)...
a string of lasting accomplishments ranging from bringing ballistic missile defense from theory to reality to transformation of the military from a Cold War garrison force to the flexible forces needed to fight the war we're in.
Add to that the rapid overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam regimes, positioning America to deal with the rise of China...
History will be kinder to Rumsfeld than the daily press, just as it has been to our Civil War leaders, because it will see facts from a greater distance than those who write and broadcast every day can achieve.
Dr. Gates said he was surprised at how much transformation of the military had actually been accomplished...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
.
He didn't KNOW this, but he KNEW we are losing the war in Iraq. Dumb@$$.
Donald Rumsfeld, a truly great man! We can't thank him enough for what he has done for this country. I only hope he knows how much he is loved and appreciated.
He probably lurks here. Freeper has become a common word among conservatives.
He stood up to the media and cowed them instead of cowering before them. I respect that. He should have given lectures to the Bushies about how to do that. W's answer was to ignore the ones he didn't like. It's much better to use their power to make them look like the silly, pompous Ted Baxters they really are. Rummy did that.
He also whooped Iraq in three weeks.
This a-hole creeps me out.
A great man.
He's been replaced by a foolish child.
This was an interesting article. I'm looking forward to Rumsfeld's book.
Exactly! Respect is a word the liberals cannot understand. I too respect everything I know about this man. I already miss him.
Great article.
But what is "527" Media?
Anyone?
Deservedly so.
Yeah, an awesome, awesome dude. I don't see anything that he did that was a failure, not at all. His enemies hated him for his successes, not his failures, and it's not a coincidence that the tide turning against him corresponded to the tide turning against us in the war.
Thanks, Don. Now go out there and make some high dollar speeches and keep sticking it in the eye of the leftist enemy within.
"You may even so enrage NYT columnist Maureen Dowd that she will write a poem excoriating you, as she did about Rumsfeld two Decembers ago."
Oh, MoDo does that to all the guys who spurn her, both in reality and in the twisted contents of her cranium. It's a tiresome pathology of hers, sort of bunny-boilerish. Solo harridans get that way after a few decades.
"But what is "527" Media?"
Nutroots, and the dinosaurs who fuel them.
A 527 group is a tax condition where by money collected can be spent to bypass the McCain/Fiengold finance law.
George Soros is a major contributor and organizer of such groups.
BTTT
The new guy caved on every single issue. Why appoint a back-stabber?
The liberals who populate today's "mainstream" media are perfect reflections of the activist Democrat mice they write for - - they are hung up on and will settle for nothing less than..... "an apology". Where's that simple drunken scumbag David Gregory these days?
I was going to guess that "527" was police code for "driveby shooting".
6 months from now, nearly all freepers will loathe Bob Gates.
I enjoyed lots of the details lower in the article, too.
Thanks!
Ping for later read.
"6 months from now, nearly all freepers will loathe Bob Gates."
I think a good number of us loathe him already. The comments he made that we are "not winning" in Iraq and the fact that he was voted in 98-2 tells me all I need to know. The Dums love and support this guy (Santorum was one to vote against him). He will never be a Rumsfeld and we have lost the leadership of a great and brilliant man as the SecDef.
Department of Defense, news briefing, August 6, 2002
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld: What do I think the U.S. policy ought to be with respect to the settlements in the occupied areas? Question: Yes, sir. Rumsfeld: Former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak made a proposal that was as forthcoming as anyone in the world could ever imagine, and Arafat turned it down. If you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it. If you're giving it to an entity that has some track record, that has a degree of accountability, that has the ability to enforce security that's promised in whatever arrangements are made, it seems to me that's one thing. If you're making a deal and yielding territory to an entity that cannot or will not do that, and there is no question but that the Palestinian Authority [has] been involved with terrorist activities, so that makes it a difficult interlocutor.
My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won. They have offered up, successive prime ministers have offered up various portions of that so-called occupied territory, the West Bank, and at no point has it been agreed upon by the other side.
I suspect it will be, even in my lifetime, that there will be some sort of an entity that will be established. Maybe it will take some Palestinian expatriates coming back into the region and providing the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick. It may be that the neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and others, will have to assist in providing a degree of accountability.
But certainly everyone has to hope and pray that there will be something that could be an effective interlocutor so that they could make a deal.
The settlement issues--it's hard to know whether they're settlements in portions of the real estate that will end up with the entity that you make an arrangement with or Israel. So it seems to me focusing on settlements at the present time misses the point. The real point is to get an effective interlocutor. The real point is to get a condition so that you can have a peace agreement. And those are exactly the things that President [George W.] Bush and Secretary [of State Colin] Powell have been working on, and indeed, working particularly with Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
PING
I still have hope that Gates isn't as stupid as he seems and will learn to deal with the press better.
Taking the ANTI-Rumsfeld posture if you will.
Personally I like the "TELL EM LIKE IT IS" types rather than the "Can't we all get along types." The DIMS always WIN with the latter.
Rummy, we are going to miss you!
Maybe President Bush had a plan here.....
Get Gates in, he's whimpy, so President Bush can get his things done here....
Good plan Mr. President!!!
I have printed this off to send to my WW II vet brother in law and my son too. Something to keep and read and re read.
And no thanks to Powell and his a$$hole buddy Shinseki, we are now paying for their rotten advice.
Obviously, with only 30 something posts...with all of the articles posted re: the Iraq Study Group, this one got missed by a lot of people.
I think if you know of people that have been on some of the flame war threads...you MIGHT want to ping them to this thread...and let them read for themselves.
Just another neocon.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT
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That would be General Shinseki, who created the Stryker Combat Teams, and was pushed out because of his off the target insistance that a force of upwards of 200,000 was necessary to stabilize Iraq post invasion. The black berets were silly, and he didn't get along with Rummy, but I'm not so sure our problems in Iraq can be blamed on him.
Hah, I was going to ping you to this.
Shinsekiw wasn't forced out...he had already turned in his resignation..
That "forced out" story is MSM and dem propaganda.
That's true. Personally, I don't see much blame attributable to him. He was probably right about troop levels.
Another name for the Mainstream Media.
Since they act like a political Soros-funded 527 group, might as well call them one.
Headlines, January 1, 2007:
"Now retired from DoD, Rumsfeld announces Presidential run!"
I can dream.....
I missed this yesterday...focusing too much on the ISG articles...but, boy does this shed some light on the behind the scenes machinations, doesn't it??
Yet, Powell is the toast of the town for NOT wanting to go into Iraq..."you break it you own it"...blah, blah.
There is so much that has happened that we may never know about...but, I hope that in some memoirs, Pres. Bush, Cheney and Rummy tell the whole story...for history sake, if nothing else.
Me too, sleuthie.
Thanks for posting it. I especially remember this question being discussed on FR - but then it fell down a memory hole. Maybe not here but definitely in the Drive by Media and among the political pundits.
Few know that in early 2003 - a month or more before the Iraq invasion - President Bush was presented with two plans for post-war Iraq. The first, written by CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided for a long occupation of Iraq and the nation-building that the president renounced in his 2000 campaign. The second, a Pentagon plan authored by Rumsfeld's team, provided for the establishment of a provisional government before the invasion and American withdrawal within months of Saddam's overthrow. The president, convinced by Powell that "if you break it, you own it", chose the Powell-Tenet plan and ordered Rumsfeld to carry it out.
(Maybe few knew it, the exact number of plans etc, but it was discussed here, and there were several posters who IIRC correctly analyzed the conflict between State (in collusion with CIA) and Pentagon.
As someone else wrote on this thread - I so look forward to reading Rumsfeld's memoirs.
Also, note the lesson to be learnt here. No lie must be allowed to live - in the stupid media driven world it is a must to combat the untruths, lies and spins. As we see today the fates of nations hang on the truth being set free.
Despite his image as someone who doesn't suffer fools lightly Rumsfeld has still been to kind. He should have hanged Powell, Tenet, Bremer et co out to dry a long time ago.
"too kind"
Rumsfeld will not only be leaving with a smile, he'll be leaving with the love and respect of a LOT of Americans (including mine).
We can tell you facts and relate principles, but we can't make you understand.
Confirmation that objects in the mirror many not be all that they appear.
If Nova is still there I'd consider it.
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