“Feebled Minds”: Attention Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama Has Been President for 4 Years
The former defense secretary says he prefers Mitt Romney because the Republican has more executive experience. Did he miss the top line on Obama’s resume?
Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Donald Rumsfeld made two comments of note about President Obama and the upcoming election.
HUGH HEWITT: You’ve been involved in government for a long time, Mr. Secretary. Is President Obama the weakest president of your lifetime?
DONALD RUMSFELD: He may very well be. I suppose the other one that stands out is President Jimmy Carter as a person who had a somewhat different attitude about America and its role in the world, and felt that we needed to kind of be in decline and withdrawal, and not contribute to the peace and stability that exists in the world.
What’s striking here is the emphasis on the alleged attitudes and feelings of Carter and Obama. It would be easy enough to cite actions that they took or policies that they implemented, and to say, “This hastened America’s decline,” or “That did not contribute to peace or stability.” Instead Rumsfeld plays armchair psychologist, guessing at inner thoughts that none of us can know, and that contradict the avowed motivations of the two men he is discussing.
Note too that Rumsfeld served under a president on whose watch Al Qaeda successfully attacked us, and who launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And here he is complaining that the Obama Administration’s policies “do not contribute to the peace and stability that exists in the world.” Is Rumsfeld suggesting that he was prioritizing “peace and stability” as defense secretary?
But it’s actually this second exchange that most seriously calls into question Rumsfeld’s analysis.
HUGH HEWITT: And a last question, what do you make of Mitt Romney’s qualifications to be president?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I must say, I do feel that a person who’s been in an executive position has an advantage. A lot of legislators run for the presidency and for governor positions, and I think someone who has that background of having to be an executive would come into that office with a head start. I would add that I think that it is, I’m told, I’ve read articles, I assume they’re correct, to the effect that today in the White House, we have the smallest percentage of people who have any background in business whatsoever. And I think that people who think that this country is about government are wrong.
I think this country is about the private sector. It’s about risk taking and investment and initiative, and industriousness and the values that built this country. And I think someone who’s been in business, as Governor Romney has, brings to it that nice mixture of executive experience and government as well as a business background, which is a stark contrast to a community organizer, and a person who served in the United States Senate for about fifteen minutes. (emphasis added)
Yes, aside from the four years Obama has spent as commander in chief and head of the executive branch, what possible experience does he have that would prepare him to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch? Rumsfeld’s analysis would make a lot of sense if it were 2008, and Romney was running against Senator Obama. In 2012, if you think the person with more experience relevant to the presidency should win the election, it’s bizarre to conclude that the candidate who has never actually been president is that more experienced person.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, June 5, 2012
“Crowing” And The Torture Apologists
The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the C.I.A. from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)
John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.
There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.
That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.
Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify President Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.
This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?
There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.
No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence.
The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.
By: Editorial Board, The New York Times, May 4, 2011
Are There No Standards For Punditry?
Last Sunday, ABC’S “This Week” turned to none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the former Bush administration defense secretary, to get his informed judgment of the mission in Libya. Last month, the journal International Finance featured former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan commenting on what is “hampering” the economic recovery.
Next we’ll see a cable talk show inviting the former head of BP to tell us what it takes to do offshore drilling safely.
Are there no standards whatsoever for punditry? Do high government or corporate officials suffer no consequence for leading us into calamity? Public officials who have failed spectacularly in office should have the common decency to retire in disgrace. But even if modern-day officials know no shame, why in the world would opinion pages, network talk shows and reputable journals give them a forum to offer their opinions, when they have shown that their advice isn’t worth the air it disturbs?
On ABC, Rumsfeld criticized Obama for “confusion” in the Libyan mission, noting that the coalition “is the smallest in modern history.”
As Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld played a lead role in perhaps the worst foreign policy calamity since the British burned down the White House in the War of 1812. He helped cook the books that justified the war of choice in Iraq, costing thousands of Americans their lives and limbs and the government a projected $3 trillion. His war squandered the global goodwill in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, left millions of Iraqis dead or displaced, and strengthened our adversaries in Iraq and the terrorists of al-Qaeda.
Rumsfeld personally approved the torture techniques that despoiled the nation’s reputation when they were revealed at Abu Ghraib prison. He is now hawking his unrepentant and disingenuous memoir, which concludes that the Bush administration “got it right” on the big things in Iraq and elsewhere. Why would any rational news show invite his opinion on anything except maybe how to live with yourself after screwing up big-time?
Greenspan, the ex-Maestro Chairman of the Federal Reserve, argues that “the current government activism is hampering what should be a broad-based, robust economic recovery, driven in significant part by the positive wealth effect of a buoyant U.S. and global stock market.”
But Greenspan hasn’t got a clue. His ruinous policies at the Federal Reserve helped drive the economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression. He cheered on the housing bubble while denying its existence; touted the benefits of subprime mortgages; turned a blind eye to reports of pervasive fraud and abuse in mortgage markets; and opposed the regulation of derivatives that, he claimed, were making the system more stable.
Greenspan admitted he was “shocked” that his worldview had a “flaw.” An apology, penance, self-reflection and even a memoir describing what he did wrong are in order. Surely we can be spared Mr Greenspan’s opinion of what impedes recovery from the Great Recession that his own blind market fundamentalism did so much to produce.
And do we really need Oliver North’s views on the Constitution and the law? “[I]t’s unparalleled in my entire experience in the military going all the way back to the 1960s,” North said. “Every president has gone to the Congress to get a resolution to support whatever it is he wanted to do.”
This from the White House operative who ran a secret war not only without congressional authorization, but also despite a congressional prohibition — a folly that ended in his indictment and nearly in the impeachment of his president.
There is a striking double standard operating in America. We hear much about enforcing “accountability” from the powers that be. Teachers, students and schools are judged in high-stakes tests. Minority students particularly are subjected to “no excuses” school punishments. Punitive “three strikes and you’re out” prison sentencing disproportionately snares those caught for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses.
At the top of society, bankers, CEOs and hedge funders enjoy increased license, prestige and lavish rewards. Yet when their excesses, lawlessness, ideological blindness or simple incompetence result in calamity, there seems to be no consequence. When Charles Ferguson received an Oscar for his riveting documentary “Inside Job,” he reminded the audience that “not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.” Wall Street bankers haven’t been prosecuted.
Rumsfeld and the neo-cons still enjoy plush chairs in think tanks as well as high visibility and high speaking fees. Greenspan is allowed to pose as the Maestro, even after his reputation has been completely shredded.
In Japan, high officials who failed so spectacularly would be contemplating seppuku. In Britain, they’d resign, repair to drink and end up in the House of Lords. In America, they become pundits and are offered a stage to argue the same ideas that earlier brought the nation to near-ruin, rewriting history to fit their theory.
As Talleyrand said of the restored French monarchy under Louis XVIII, they have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” It is a pity that these discredited pundits are offered a stage to project their inanity on the rest of us.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 29, 2011
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Fox News trumped even that, trotting out retired Marine Col. Oliver North, the former Reagan security staffer who orchestrated the secret war in Nicaragua, to indict President Obama for — you can’t make this stuff up — failing to get a congressional resolution in support of the mission in Libya.