Whitaker's Current Articles
August 30, 2003
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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.
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