Looking for democracy

Looking for democracy

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated incredible courage on August 29 when he appeared before another Bush administration hand-picked, super-friendly audience, this time made up of American Legion conventioneers meeting in Salt Lake City who never met a Bush administration foreign policy they didn’t like . . . or question!

To cheers of support, they were told by Mr. Rumsfeld that anyone who’s ignorant enough to criticize the Bush administration’s way of dealing with terrorists, and all U.S. actions overseas (and at home as well), is exactly like those who ignored the threats of fascism in the 1930s, wanting peace at any price by appeasing Adolph Hitler and Nazi government goals.

These misguided persons, American and British alike, Rumsfeld contended, gave a pass to the criminally-minded German regime, thereby being responsible for getting World War II underway and the death and destruction that followed. His history is just a bit slanted for the purpose of propaganda but, what the heck, who has the temerity to tell this guy he’s behaving a lot like Joseph Goebbels.

Meanwhile, oh, what we’ve give to have the brave Mr. Rumsfeld present his charges against Bush administration critics before a cross-section of not handpicked and not pre-screened for total-support Americans. And oh how wonderful it’d be if the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were still the law of the land. And what a day of wonders would occur if those who are fed up and totally disillusioned with the ineptness and mistakes of the Donald Rumsfeld/Bush administration Pentagon, and the longing for the Secretary of Defense’s dismissal as a hopeless incompetent, would say to him and others in this lost without a map federal regime, you know the one that resembles Nazi Germany in 1944-45. And what if democracy were restored in the U.S. like it was in West Germany at least in the late 1940s and we didn’t have a president who wants to be king, seeking, as he and members of his administration, like Secretary Rumsfeld and VP Cheney want, to throw their critics in jail and toss the keys. And what would it be like if those who dare to take exception with the mindless determination to "stay the course" and keep the pointless deaths mounting through a war without end whose ambiguous at best and non-existent objectives at worst, that cannot be appeased however great the logic or compelling the argument, were actually listened to and whose ideas and suggestions got into the mix of Bush administration thinking and problem solving.

posted by Gene McIntyre
– http://www.statesmanjournal.com/app...