Let’s remind ourselves what Secretary of Defense, Donald Rmsfeld actually said at both the VFW and the American Legion. First some words from the VFW speech:
We're really fighting the first war of the 21st century, the first war that's been fought in the new media realities with bloggers and 24-hour talk radio and Internet and e-mails and video cameras, digital cameras. Things speed around the world so rapidly, truth generally takes a long time to catch up with untruth.
As our forces strive to protect civilians, the enemy uses civilians as shields. As our troops strive to obey the laws of warfare, the enemy uses those laws against us. And as our troops are held to the standards of mere perfection, the enemy is held to no standard at all. And while some at home argue for tossing in the towel, the enemy is waiting and hoping that we will do just that.
At the American Legion he said:
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.
There was a strange innocence about the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator's reaction in September of 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed: “Lord, if only I had talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided!”
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 -- as "the gulag of our times." It’s inexcusable. (Applause.)
Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths and distortions that are being told about our troops and about our country. America is not what's wrong with the world. (Applause.)
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.”
The rhetorical move here, as BushCo often do, is to confuse themselves with America. Criticize the current administration, and you are criticizing America. Further, Rumsfeld puts the blame on low-ranking troops (“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.”) for his own mistakes. It is Rmsfeld who put the troops there, gave them a confused strategy, told them to fight an insurgency with conventional tactics.
And then, of course, he equates people who disagree with him to appeasers.
Olbermann replied:
...it credits those same transient occupants, our employees, with a total omniscience, a total omniscience which neither commonsense nor this administration‘s track record, at home or abroad, suggest they deserve it.
that about what Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this, this is a democracy, still, sometimes just barely and as such, all voices count, not just his.
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 standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages to the entire fog of fear which continues to envelopes our 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 the receipt for the emperor new clothes.
Aptly, he reversed the appeasement analogy, pointing out that it was the government back in the 30s that was wrong, as the government is wrong today. And he wisely closed with timeless words from Edward R. Murrow:
"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 unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not disended from fearful men, not from men who fear to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. "
It took a lot of courage for Olbermann to rebut so strongly Rumsfeld, a courage Howard Dean just couldn’t quite match earlier in the show. And it courage for his bosses to allow him six minutes to stand up for freedom.
Keith Olbermann, American Hero.