Forget that Donald Rumsfeld is a liar, a war monger, and a torture advocate. On Friday Morning Guy Raz had the inside scoop on the kinder, gentler Rummy: "for the past three years, every few days, far from the white hot camera lights, Rumsfeld and his wife Joyce have quietly made their way to Walter Reed Medical Center They go there to cheer up the injured troops back from the front...."
4 comments:
To be honest, I don't really care about Rumsfeld one way or the other. He's an nasty arrogant asshole (his role with aspartame at Searle makes fe furious), but he didn't pick this war, I doubt he was in favor of it, and his departure won't make an ounce of difference with regard to Iraq. He's certainly culpable in the torture policies, but the primary blame lay with his superiors. (may they all live long enough to see the inside of a prison)
Anyway, this Sunday morning's show featured two pieces that really stood out for me; the piece on the innate human moral grammar code, which was absolutely fascinating; (so much of our drama and storytelling deals with the flaws and paradoxes in our moral engines) and the insultingly fawning and girlish interview of Guerrero (who otherwise came off very well, very interesting guy, very grounded). Horrible interview.
I think 50% of my problem with NPR isn't the politics (which I know is the focus of this blog, although I have a BIG problem with their political spin and devious obfuscations); rather, it's the attitude and tone of the hosts. It's simultaneously patronizing, infantilizing, arrogant, and insouciant. And so, so phony. How do they do that?
I hear you... Many readers have commented on the general tone of NPR news, which I agree is an odd, psuedo-hip, glib, smug mixture that seems very pleased with the way power is set up and exercised in this country.
Rumsfeld, despite his 'magnetic' personality and his tendency to impress onlookers with a media motormouth that implied that he was much more brilliant than his mediocre mind actually was, is, in my opinion, one of the great motivational cogs in the Iraq war. If he didn't want it, his ego soon overrode any common sense that it had access to. He, along with the rest of war designers ('architect' is a wholly incorrect term; any architect worth his or her salt has to see a job through to realization; 'designer' is a better term, as in 'designer drugs') - at any rate, Rumsfeld, along with the other war-desirers, rolled the dice and gambled that the glory would be theirs. As the head of the world's biggest corporation, Don could have made a difference in how to approach the Iraq situation. He and others chose to prosecute war at any cost, and, as a supreme egotist, he had the time of his life as a fringe benefit. He is culpable in so many ways, and as a non-lawyer, I cannot calculate the score he has racked up as far as offences are concerned. Yes, he instills rage because he is so classically detached from reality, that any perception of criticism he might have experienced would only strengthen his resolve in proceeding further with his madness. Don Rumsfeld was (and I'm not trying to be cute) 'the Don' of the Pentagon, and his mafia style of power administration will be the subject of many a thesis. I pity the researchers who will have to devote so much time to this person, who is so representative of America's failure to install persons of worth and brilliance in important public offices.
I seem to recall a story that Rummy was very hot after Saddam less than an hour after the 9-11 events. He was the first to bring the subject up. But the part of the NPR piece which struck me was a small story a general's appearance at a congressional hearing where he said that any effor at establishing stability in Iraq would be met with job termination. In other words, Rumsfeld perpetuated the anarchy in Iraq, which in itself is a war crime.
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