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Speachy Keen
It just fills a cynic's heart with joy to see the season of shrill political rhetoric kicking off momentously. Just five days short of the anniversary of 9/11, we can already hear the hissing.
Last week, Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in which he compared critics of the administration's war efforts to the Nazi appeasers who failed to prevent World War II. I haven't seen a video of the speech itself. A search for Rumsfeld on YouTube.com produces mostly iterations of Keith Olberman's response:
Exsqueze me?
Olberman suggests that Rumsfeld is more like Neville Chamberlain than any of his opponents, on the grounds that Chamberlain was sure he knew what was right and tried to hush his opponents. The huge disanalogy that Chamberlain was a peacemonger and Rumsfeld is a warmonger is a problem on the rhetorical level of Olberman's argument, but overall it's a good speech. Meanwhile, Peter Galbraith has written a column for the Boston Globe which argues that it was actually decades of appeasement by exactly the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and other neo-cons that kept Hussein in power for so long:
Will the Real Iraq Appeasers Please Stand Up?
And just recently Condoleeza Rice has compared the opponents of the war to those who would have ended the Civil War early, leaving the institution of slavery intact:
Rice Checks
What's hillarious about this is that we now officially have the Republicans playing the race card. Mind you, the Democrats have long been trafficing in the accusation that a pro-war policy disproportionately affects minorities, since their relative poverty means that they largely fill the ranks of the armed forces that have to actually fight the wars. But the irony is that the Republicans often complain about the Democratic use of race as an emotional cudgel in debates.
Even more recently, Bush has given a speech attempting to reinforce the association between his opponents and the Nazi appeasers. Again, I learned about this from Keith Olberman's response:
Shameless
Bush alludes to the fact that Hitler's plan had been evident in his book Mein Kampf, but even after he came to power in Germany, people didn't use it to anticipate his moves, for some reason. But by making this comparison, Bush offers a convenient opening to those who'd like to remind everyone that in the lead up to 9/11, the Bush adminstration was guilty ignoring the evidence of the enemy's plans. There was, of course, the August 6th memo, which Condoleeza Rice testified to dismissing out of hand:
Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States
Then there was Pickard's testimony that in the summer of 2001 John Ashcroft, then attorney general for the Bush administration, "didn't want to hear about terrorism."
Again with the Terrorism
Also controversial has been ABC's decision to air a 9/11 documentary that reportedly places the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton Administration, and in its promotion is only giving previews to right-wing sources. CrooksandLiars.com has been following the story:
The Path to 9/11
The Path to the Path o 9/11
Son of the Path to 9/11
posted by: JohnnyAngel at 09/06/06 06:09 |
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