Have you no sense of decency, at long last?

The Bush administration is ramping up the rhetoric. They want Iran next. They'll do whatever it takes to win the November elections, even start another war. Rumsfeld pounded the administration's latest talking points; opponents are appeasers and/or fascists. This is typical thuggish McCarthyism-like projection, perfected by Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. The world's most dangerous terrorists are operating out of Washington, D.C.
Rummy accuses Democrats of appeasement
SALT LAKE CITY - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces "a new type of fascism" and warned against repeating the pre-World War II mistake of appeasement.
Rumsfeld alluded to critics of the Bush administration's war policies in terms associated with the failure to stop Nazism in the 1930s, "a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the Western democracies...it is apparent that many have still not learned history's lessons."

He quoted Winston Churchill as observing that trying to accommodate Hitler was "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last...I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said.


The US military could handle another war Rumsfeld said, despite deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I get asked from time to time...is the US military sufficiently stressed or strained that it really couldn't deal or cope with a problem in another part of the world...The answer is no, that's not correct. We are capable of dealing with other problems where they occur," he said, answering a question about military options for the nuclear crisis with Iran.
"I feel comfortable"... Rumsfeld warned potential enemies that the United States remained ready to take military action to defend its interests.

A new type of war against fascism.
Rumsfeld spoke to the American Legion as part of a coordinated White House strategy, before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, to take the offensive against administration critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq and growing calls to withdraw U.S. troops.
Clip from crooksandliars.com: Video Rumsfeld says war critics are Nazi appeasers
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the world faces "a new type of fascism" and likened critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis in the 1930s. In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion" about what threatens the nation’s security.

Keith Olbermann is a true American patriot. In an extraordinary break from the MSM's lockstep adulation of the Bush administration, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann told the truth. While the rest of the media forces polygamists, pedophiles, missing blondes, terror alerts, planes carrying gels, and miscellaneous distracting propaganda down our throats, a lone voice on mainstream cable news television tells it like it is. Will the rest of the "media" listen? Will they realize our Democracy is threatened while they aid and abet criminals? At long last, will they care?
Keith Olbermann, Special Comment, August 30, 2006, from Crooks and Liars:
Video
(Hat tip-aed)
--->


May this go down in history as the moment the truth broke free from the Bush administration's massively well coordinated propaganda catapult.

From crooksandliars.com

Keith had some very choice words about Rumsfeld’s "fascism" comments tonight. Watch it, save it and share it.

Olbermann delivered this commentary with fire and passion while highlighting how Rumsfeld’s comments echoes other times in our world’s history when anyone who questioned the administration was coined as a traitor, unpatriotic, communist or any other colorful term. Luckily we pulled out of those times and we will pull out of these times.

Remember - Rumsfeld did not just call the Democrats out yesterday, he called out a majority of this country. This wasn’t only a partisan attack, but more so an attack against the majority of Americans.

The transcript of Keith’s comments :
The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.
We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis - and the sober contemplation - of every American.

For it did 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, it credits 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 to England. It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords. It knew that the hard evidence it had received, which contradicted it’s own policies, it’s own conclusions - it’s own 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 - had 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.

Thus did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy excepting the fact that he has the battery plugged in backwards. His government, absolute and exclusive in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government… of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today’s Omniscient Ones. 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 flu vaccine shortages, 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 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."
And so, good night, and good luck.




LA Times has another take...Pipe Down, Rummy
Rumsfeld's cranky outburst mangles a historical analogy, bad-mouths legitimate critics, and illustrates once again why the defense secretary should resign.

What they fail to mention is that Rumsfeld is one of the leading voices of this administration. He's not going anywhere. He speaks for Bush. Bush is simply the photo op man on point. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the puppet masters with Rove executing the plan. The neocon plan.