Donald Rumsfeld @ MindSay 
Thanks to Prophecy Update I found this article from Carolyn Glick. Glick is an Israeli columnist that usually clicks with my point of view, thus when I have the opportunity to read her insights I take them.
In her article – “Olmert's ill-timed Washington visit” – her theme is that Prime Minister Olmert’s impending visit with President Bush is meaningless because a hostile Democratic Party Congress will not help President Bush help Prime Minister Olmert. The thing that caught my eye is the portion that talks about the demise of Rumsfeld and the appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense (Senate confirmation pending).
Apparently Gates is part of the “pro-Arabist” part of the Republican Party. Gates has had close associations with Brent Scowcroft and James Baker who have towed a line less favorable to the interests of Israel and more favorable with the Arab world. Gates has also been associated with former President Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Democrat Brzezinski has had a tendency to blame conflicts in the Middle East on Israel.
So you get the picture, Gates has the image to suck up to the Mohammedan Middle East to the detriment of Israel. Gates might be the Democratic Party dream confirmation for a Bush Appointee.
Donald Rumsfeld has resigned. His largely laudable DC career will be marred forever; he's McNamara without the admission of failure, and he's too old to do anything else to make his name respected. Like so many other Washington Republicans, he is a victim of his own titanic hubris. Adios, muchacho.
As we move past this election, I must refocus on finishing my stay in the University of Arizona English department.
Category: News and Politics
I'm glad John Kerry didn't win the Presidential election in 2004.
This is what he said the other day at a campaign rally at Pasadena City College "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
What he meant to say was "If you don't, you get us stuck in Iraq" and hence the punch line was not supposed to be against the brave soldier on the front line in Baghdad, but President Bush. I guess on the campaign trail this passes the laugh test but it reeks of being a sore loser.
Even if he had said what he intended to say, it still isn't very funny.
It's patronizing.
This is funny.
John Kerry isn't some first or second term member in the House though, he's the Democratic Party's most recent nominee for President. More important than what he said, or attempted to say, is that he was attempting to use the military, and not the civilian brass in the Pentagon or Secretary Rumsfeld but the everyday Airmen, Soldier, Cadet and Marine as the subject of his joke. For a man whose claim to fame was that he 'served in Vietnam' I would think he would have a little more respect for his fellow comrades in uniform. For someone who wanted you and I to entrust him as Commander-In-Chief, and who still has ambitions to do so, I find his attempted statement even more condescending than his actual gaffe.
And his comment, laid bare for all to hear, is a quintessential example of what is wrong with the Democratic Party. It's become the party of John Kerry, no longer of John Kennedy. A generation ago, the soldiers and privates in our military were by a margin of 2:1 registered Democrats to Republicans. Today, they are more than 2:1 Republican. And not because they support long-standing GOP plans to eliminate the estate tax or reform this country's tort system. It is because Republicans, conservatives, have much less of a problem than do liberals, progressives and what other adjectives those on the political left and in the Democratic party want to call themselves, with the idea of America and being American. It's that simple.
It sounds corny but it's true.
It's the culture war stupid!
Culture wars are not about abortion and guns, gay rights and the environment. They are about the notion that this is a country worth living in and not being embarassed to say so, and therefore it is a country worth sticking up for and defending.
I'm not saying John Kerry is unpatriotic. Or that Democrats are unpatriotic. But it is fair to point out that it is those on the political left who have a much harder time embracing an American national identity and uniting in common cause with their fellow citizen. There are several reasons for this.
One, is that those left-of-center, like John Kerry, think that they are smarter than those right-of-center. That Harvard, or MIT are infinitely more interesting places than say, oh, Texas. That everything in between the Ivy League and Berkeley is flyover country.
Two, those left-of-center have no problem with identity, just an American one. It's why John Kerry and those like him love to count among their supporters any group of Americans that has a hyphenated identity that seperates itself from the rest of us.
Three, John Kerry and many of his followers are baby-boomers and of the Vietnam era, and forged their political identity not so much as being anti-war, but anti-military, skeptical of the use and projection of American power in the world, opposed to defending our national interest. It's why they are always looking for some conspiracy or cabal behind every foreign policy of our government. Usama bin Laden isn't evil, the Carlyle Group or PNAC is. Saddam Hussein isn't the real threat, Halliburton is. And on, and on.
This wasn't the case back in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was the Democratic Party's standard bearer. Just reread the words in his 1961 inaugural address.
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
If you didn't hear his Boston accent which gives his identity away, you'd swear it came out of the mouth of a Republican. And it would be followed by charges of imperialism, racism, colonialism and every other ism that you learn in sociology and ethnic studies classes in college.
From my favorite Constitutional law professor, and talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt; "Kerry reminded people that the war against the war has been underway since mid-2003, and that the Democrats have never taken the many opportunities to try and rally around the effort to reconstruct a free Iraq but at every turn have demanded an exit on some sort of rushed and arbitrary timetable. They disparaged the effort to push elections forward, then the effort to form a government, and now that government's effort to rule and unite. The enemy has been watching, and has calculated that they only way they can win is by waiting out America ---just as the North Vietnamese did."
Kerry has since issued an apology. Always a day late and a dollar short, he can't even be sincere in saying he's sorry. Like his Iraq votes, he was for what he said, before he was against it.
The troops aren't buying it though, and neither should you. Remember who understands that we are whether we like it or not a country at war. And that you don't fight wars unless you intend to win. John Kerry and too many Democrats don't want us to win. They don't want to win because they never supported getting in the fight in the first place. Not winning in Iraq validates their anti-war position all along. Democrats and John Kerry do not want bad things to happen to this country or our interests, or more directly to you and I one morning on our way to work or in an airplane up in the sky. But they have no plan or strategy to prevent such incidents from happening; be it a suicide bomber on a bus like in Israel or a spectacle of the 9/11 variety.
It's not their patriotism I question.
It's their judgment.
Any vote for any Democrat is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability. Vote for victory. Vote Republican.
In an uncharacteristically sensible opinion, considering the auspices under which it was carried out, Leandro Despouy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers ‘voiced “strong objections” regarding the conduct of the trial’, as reported on the UN website.
Despouy cogently observes,
The tribunal has been established during an occupation considered by many as illegal, is composed of judges who have been selected during this occupation, including non Iraqi citizens, and has been mainly financed by the United States.
…lack of observance of a legal framework that conforms to international human rights principles and standards, in particular the right to be tried by an independent and impartial tribunal which upholds the right to a defence… risks being seen as the expression of the verdict of the winners over the losers…Since its beginning one of the judges, five candidate judges, three defence lawyers and an employee of the tribunal have been killed.
Furthermore, the body had no mandate to address “the war crimes committed by foreign troops during the first Gulf war (1990), nor the war crimes committed after 1 May 2003, date of the beginning of the occupation.”
He also discouraged Saddam’s execution which would be an open contradiction to the growing international tendency to abolish capital punishment.
Perhaps more importantly, it lets Saddam’s main backers entirely off the hook, as Robert Fisk chronicled in yesterday’s CounterPunch, citing US and British supply of a range of biological and chemical agents that they were perfectly well aware were being used against the Iranian conscripts in the first Gulf War in the 1980s, as well as the Halabja massacre, which the US cynically tried to blame on Iran when Saddam was their buddy. Norman Solomon provides a list of compelling accusations specifically against US Secretary of ‘Defense’ Donald Rumsfeld.
Indeed, a really thorough investigation would have to go right back to the late Fifties and examine how the Ba’ath came to overthrow the Qassem government in the first place, and how Saddam rose to preeminence in that august institution. And it might even determine who needs to stand trial for the crimes against humanity of the UN sanctions regime, characterized by its administrators, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, as ‘genocide’.
If Saddam doesn’t live to testify in all those trials and help bring his backers to justice, it will be, if possible, even more obvious that the principal function of this kangaroo court has been to protect the guilty.
Boehner: ‘Rumsfeld Is The Best Thing That’s Happened To The Pentagon In 25 Years’
Think Progress | October 29 2006
This morning on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos asked House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) whether he agreed with the growing number of prominent conservatives who think Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign.
Boehner said that “Rumsfeld is the best thing that’s happened to the Pentagon in 25 years.” He told Stephanopoulos the buck should stop nowhere. “Let’s not take the problems in Iraq, the tough fight that we’re in there and blame it on anyone.” Watch it
Transcript:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me just ask one more question on this. Your own senators, I said Mike DeWine, thinks Rumsfeld has to go. Do you agree?
BOEHNER: I think Donald Rumsfeld is the best thing that’s happened to the Pentagon in 25 years. This Pentagon and our military needs a transformation and I think Donald Rumsfeld is the only man in America who knows where the bodies are buried at the Pentagon, has enough experience to help transform that institution. Let’s not take the problems in Iraq, the tough fight that we’re in there and blame it on anyone. We’re in a tough fight. Al Qaeda is doing everything they can to disrupt our efforts in Iraq, to disrupt the new government, creating more violence than anyone can imagine and defeating al Qaeda there is important, because if we were to pull out before we win, we will embolden every terrorist in every corner of the world and then instead of fighting them in Iraq, we’ll be fighting them on every street in America.
Does anyone else believe this load of bull? Fighting them on every street in America?! That's completely ridiculous!