“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” MSNBC, August 30, 2006

The man, who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack. Donald S. Rumsfeld is not a prophet. Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable comments to the Veterans of Foreign Wars [actually, it was the American Legion] yesterday demand the deep analysis - and the sober contemplation - of every American.

For they do not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence, indeed, the loyalty of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land.

Worse still, they credit those same transient occupants, our employees, with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom, and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as "his" troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq. It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right, and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril, with a growing evil, powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England’s, in the 1930’s. It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England. It knew Germanywas not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted policies, conclusions, and omniscience, needed to be dismissed. The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all, it "knew" that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic’s name was Winston Churchill. Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill. History, and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England, taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts. . .

But back to today’s Omniscient’s. That about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this:

This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count, not just his. Had he or his President perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience , about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago, we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego. But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have inadvertently or intentionally profited and benefited both personally and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused… the United States of America>?

The confusion we — as its citizens - must now address, is stark and forbidding. But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note with hope in your heart that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this Administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a "new type of fascism." As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that< though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow. But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed, "confused" or "immoral."< Thus forgive me for reading Murrow in full:

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty," he said, in 1954.

"We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear - one, of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment , unpopular."

Address delivered at to the Annual American Legion by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, August 29, 2006.

Thank you so very much. I appreciate that a great deal, that warm welcome. . .

To the Spirit of Service Awardees, congratulations. It is impressive to note what you’re doing while you serve our country in uniform. . .

No one is more proud of these young people than their Commander-in-Chief, and I know that President Bush is looking forward to being with you later this week. It’s a privilege to work with a president who is determined to protect our flag. We are fortunate to have a leader of strong resolve at a time of war.

Through all the challenges, he remains the same man who stood atop the rubble in Manhattan with a bullhorn vowing to fight back. The leader who told a grieving nation that we will never forget what was lost. And the President who has worked every day to fulfill his vow to protect the American people and to bring the enemy to justice or to bring justice to the enemy. . .

And on a personal note, I want to commend the American Legion for its sponsorship of the Boy Scouts. I know there are places where Scouting is kind of put down. Well, I was a proud Cub Scout; a Boy Scout; an Explorer Scout; an Eagle Scout; and a Distinguished Eagle Scout; and the Scouts represent, in my view, some of the very best qualities of our country, and they certainly merit our support.

The American Legion — actually the members of the American Legion — have achieved a great deal since its founding in the months following World War I, when those small number of folks got together in a hotel room in Europe looking for a way to help some of their fellow veterans who would be coming home soon.

That year — 1919 — turned out to be one of the pivotal junctures in modern history with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of the League of Nations, a treaty and an organization intended to make future wars unnecessary and obsolete. Indeed, 1919 was the beginning of a period where, over time, a very different set of views would come to dominate public discourse and thinking in the West.

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then-recent memory of World War I could be avoided.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace, even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear. It was, as Winston Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last. . .

I recount that history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism. Today another enemy, a different kind of enemy has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like < New York, Washington D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow, and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.
We need to consider the following questions, I would submit:

With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased? Can folks really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists? Can we afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply law enforcement problems, like robbing a bank or stealing a car; rather than threats of a fundamentally different nature requiring fundamentally different approaches? And can we really afford to return to the destructive view that , America, not the enemy, but America, is the source of the world’s troubles?

These are central questions of our time, and we must face them and face them honestly.
We hear every day of new plans, new efforts to murder Americans and other free people. Indeed, the plot that was discovered in London that would have killed hundreds — possibly thousands — of innocent men, women and children on aircraft flying from London to the United States should remind us that this enemy is serious, lethal, and relentless.
It’s a strange time:

When a database search of America’s leading newspapers turns up literally 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers who has been punished for misconduct — 10 times more —than the mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror;

Or when a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our armed forces — the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard — as a “mercenary army;”

When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists; and the once CNN Baghdad bureau chief finally admits that as bureau chief in Baghdad, he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein’s crimes when he was in charge there so that CNN could keep on reporting selective news;

And it’s a time when Amnesty International refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay — which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare — “the gulag of our times.” It’s inexcusable. . .
The struggle we are in — the consequences are too severe — the struggle too important to have the luxury of returning to that old mentality of “Blame America First.”. . .
You know from experience personally that in every war there have been mistakes, setbacks, and casualties. War is, as Clemenceau said, “a series of catastrophes that result in victory.”
And in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don’t live up to the standards of the oath and of our country. But you also know that they are a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation.
And that is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.
Our enemies know this well. They frequently invoke the names of Beirut or Somalia — places they see as examples of American retreat and American weakness. And as we’ve seen — even this month — in Lebanon, they design attacks and manipulate the media to try to demoralize public opinion. They doctor photographs of casualties. They use civilians as human shields. And then they try to provoke an outcry when civilians are killed in their midst, which of course was their intent.
The good news is that most Americans, though understandably influenced by what they see and read, have good inner gyroscopes. They have good center of gravity. So, I’m confident that over time they will evaluate and reflect on what is happening in this struggle and come to wise conclusions about it. . .
The extremists themselves call Iraq the “epicenter” in the War on Terror. And our troops know how important their mission is. . .

The question is not whether we can win; it’s whether we have the will to persevere to win. I’m convinced that Americans do have that determination and that we have learned the lessons of history, of the folly of trying to turn a blind eye to danger. These are lessons you know well, lessons that your heroism has helped to teach to generations of Americans.

May God bless each of you. May God bless the men and women in uniform, and their families. And may God continue to bless our wonderful country.
Thursday, August 31, 2006

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