I'm sorry there was a disturbance, folks, but it's all over now.Hi there. The “real” world intervened for a while there, but I’ll try to pick up where I left off.
I haven’t had a chance to reconnect with the blogosphere yet, so this may be a massive retread, but I wanted to comment briefly on Rumsfeld’s press conference yesterday. He was asked a two-part question (all quotes are paraphrases, as I cannot find a transcript online at this time): First, how would he respond to Howard Dean’s assertion that Americans are not safer since the capture of Saddam Hussein and second, why is the United States not devoting the same resources to the capture of Osama bin Laden.
Rumsfeld began by saying he would not answer the first question, because it was inappropriate for him to respond to everything every politician said, because then, the DoD would be come embroiled in politics. He then tried to seem like he was answering the second question by purportedly “correcting” it by pointing out that the division that captured Saddam was also doing “lots of other things”. When pressed to answer the question, he insulted the reporter and refused to answer the question because “I don’t think someone who asks a question like your first question gets a second shot.”
Christ what a prick. I’m glad we’re bringing in the year with more bullshit evasion from the master of non-speak. If we are safer, why not just say we are safer? Not because answering the question would embroil the DoD in “politics”, whatever that means, but because the capture of Saddam Hussein did not make us safer. Why, even when this administration does something praiseworthy and positive, must they continue their PR bait-and-switch game? Is deception so ingrained in their approach to politics that they cannot stop lying even when it is unnecessary to do so?
But what really bothers me is the answer implicit in Rumsfeld’s non-answer to the second question. He did not say “Of course we are devoting equal resources to the capture of Osama bin Laden. In fact, we are devoting greater resources—it is our top priority,” which is what I hoped he would say. He did not even say “I cannot discuss efforts to catch Osama bin Laden for reasons of national security, but be assured that it is our top priority.” Instead, he refused to answer the question. Which I can only interpret as an implicit admission that finding bin Laden is not the administration’s top priority, and that they are not devoting the same resources to finding bin Laden as they did to finding Hussein.
Why not?
Read Less...
