• August 30, 2003 --Sometimes Rumsfeld is a Pain in the ...  Sometimes Rumsfeld is a Problem  

• August 30, 2003 -- Rumsfeld Cannot Admit He Might be Wrong

• August 23, 2003 -- Sometimes O'Reilly is a Pain in ....Sometimes O'Reilly is a Problem, Too  

Fun Quote:

Moderation in all things is an extreme

                Sometimes Rumsfeld is a Pain in the ...Sometimes Rumsfeld is a Problem             

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is often a great relief because he often says what us mere Americans wish to hell SOMEBODY would say, even when he’s wrong.

A lot of us are desperately tired of hearing people who think they are sophisticated talking about how we should never get mad at anybody and we should say nice things no matter what.  I’ve been in international negotiations, and believe me, when it gets serious, nobody gives a damn what you said about France last week. Least of all the French negotiators.

Besides, when these self-styled “sophisticates” use the word “diplomacy,” they mean “lie.”  When Americans talk turkey, they get laughs and admiration.   When they try to act diplomatic, it just looks as silly as it is.

On the other hand, Rumsfeld has the bad characteristics of a conservative.  Liberals want to keep weapons out of the hands of honest Americans.   But honest Americans are not the problem when it comes to weapons.   Rumsfeld wants to keep information away from “the common people” and limit it to professionals.   But the fact is that it is the professionals who are an information sieve.

My boss was senior on the Select Intelligence Committee, and I was Special Assistant to the head of the entire Federal service on security clearances.   Let me tell you something you may believe or not as you choose: the only reason the Soviet KGB did not know every secret it wanted to know was because they were stupid and grossly inefficient.  

The head of the Cuba section of United States Defense Intelligence Agency spent her entire career reporting directly to Castro.   She was only recently caught and sent to prison.  She was not the only person Cuba, the KGB, and all the rest had reporting directly to them from inside the United States Government.

And they STILL didn’t have all our secrets!

But they didn’t have some stuff because they were hopelessly incompetent, despite what all the books tell you.

I will tell you what is NOT, NOT, NOT the reason the Communists didn’t have all our secrets.  It was NOT because those secrets were kept by the little shirt-tail Napoleons like Rumsfeld and his precious officials with all the clearances.

It is among those professional bureaucrats that our enemies plant their agents.  

Rumsfeld is big on keeping secrets for the same reason that some policemen are big on gun control.  He wants to be mysterious.  In fact, it is a tribute to the dedication of working policemen – the ones who don’t get promoted -– that so many of them are not for gun control.   After all, with gun control they are big men, because only they are allowed to have guns. 

Being the only one who gets to carry a gun is big thing to a little man.

Likewise Rumsfeld wants to keep secrets for the privileged folks like himself.  That part of him is a little man.



                               Rumsfeld Cannot Admit He Might be Wrong                                     


"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken!"  This is a famous quote from Oliver Cromwell to the Scottish  Presbyterian rulers before he went to war with them.

When a good soldier is asked a policy question, his answer is, "That question is for a higher pay grade." I was in such a pay grade, and God knows the people who trusted me were at that level.  if you have a conscience, you keep telling yourself that you didn't really make that decision that keeps you awake at night.

Sometimes you believe it, sometimes you don't.

My blood runs cold when I hear a quote from Lyndon Johnson.  A reporter said that he leveled with them once about the Vietnam War.  Said Johnson, "I will not be the first American president to go down into history for losing a war."

As I say, that statement gives me cold chills.  Here was a man who was making decisions about the deaths of thousands of Americans on the basis of how he would look in the history books.

I seem to be the only person who gets the willies at thinking about this statement.  If I caught myself thinking that way, I'd go to the nearest insane asylum.

Rumsfeld suffers from the same disease.   He will not consider that maybe the critics were right, maybe we do need more troops in Iraq.  I don't say we do, I just say that Rumsfeld will not consider it because it would mean he is wrong.

I have a feeling that Rumsfeld and Bush worry a lot more about being right than they do about being personally responsible for getting Americans killed.



         Sometimes O'Reilly is a Pain in the ...Sometimes O'Reilly is a Problem, too         

Like Rumsfeld, Bill O'Reilly of The O'Reilly Factor on Fox Cable News is a real relief for us Americans.  He often says exactly what we are dying to say, and that is why he is the most popular person by far on cable television.

But O'Reilly is a Northern Irish Catholic who spends all his time in the national media which consists of Jews and WASPs who look upon Catholics, and especially ethnic Catholics, as peasants.  Anti-Catholicism was accurately described a century ago as "the anti-Semitism of the Intellectuals."   Back then people generally looked down on Jews, but the academic community, including its large contingent of Jews, looked down on Catholics.

They still do.

The result is that Bill O'Reilly has the same weaknesses that are shown by the leading Northeastern voice of Catholic conservatism, National Review.  O'Reilly and National Review like to say that they don't care what WASPs and Jews think of them, but their every thought and statement begins and ends with what the "Intellectual anti-Semites" think of them.

William Buckley, who founded and owns National Review, is not only a Catholic, but his family is Southern.  That is a double whammy from the media point of view.  He is the peasant's peasant. When he went to Yale he was, from the point of view of the anti-Semitism of the Intellectual, both Jewish and black.

Buckley and O'Reilly desperately try to prove they are good Yankees.  This gets very tiresome.   National Review insults the South at every opportunity.  It refers to Southerners as "southerners," even though that category is just plain WRONG.   Hawaiians are living south of the Mexican border, as are Puerto Ricans.  Southern California is a as far south as the Old Confederacy.

The real "southerners" of the world are researchers at the South Pole.  This is the kind of distinction National Review talks about all the time, but no inaccuracy is as important as proving to Northern intellectual anti-Semites that they are good Yankees, not at all like the Catholic peasants or the Southern peasants.

O'Reilly went to pieces over Georgia high school students who didn't want to dance with blacks, so they held their own private prom.  Bill Press was proud of O'Reilly for that.  Press said, "That's what America is about.  Blacks and whites go to school together, they should dance together.

O'Reilly said that when the Founding Fathers called this "the United States," the word "united" referred to interracial dancing.

Yes, Virginia, that is what Bill O'Reilly SAID, and he said it more than once.

When it comes to proving to Northern Intellectual Anti-Semites that they are not bigoted Catholic peasants, O'Reilly is true fruitcake.  When it comes to proving to Northern Intellectual Anti-Semites that they are not a bunch of peasants, National Review goes for simple bad spelling.