Secretary Rumsfeld Stakeout at the Senate

[Rhiannon12866]

(Senate Stakeout with Senator John W. Warner; Gen. Peter Pace, Vice Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. John Keane, Acting Chief of Staff of the Army)

Warner: The Secretary has had another briefing with the Senate. The Senate has had a busy week. We had the Deputy Secretary before the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, tomorrow have General Dayton and his associate in the civilian side under Bremer will before my committee and the Intelligence Committee. So we’ve had a full week and consultation by the Department of Defense.

Mr. Secretary.

Rumsfeld: Questions...? I’ve got Gen. Jack Keane the Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army and the Vice Chairman Gen. Pete Pace.

Q: Mr. Secretary, Senator Biden says that you’re not telling the truth about the troops in Iraq. Maybe you believe that the (inaudible). Is Senator Biden right? Are you not telling the truth?

Rumsfeld: I didn’t hear him say anything like that. I hate to comment on something I didn’t hear. I heard him questioning you yesterday and Paul Wolfowitz yesterday.

Pace: He was mostly concerned about the cost that we had not provided him with what the total cost was.

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030730-secdef0482.html

[punpirate]

1. Rumsfeld has questions?

Rumsfeld is as crazy as a shithouse rat on a tuna boat.

`Nuff said.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. I agree with you

I am posting this for one reason. My friend, who is a graduate of West Point and career army, has been going round and round with me about the war with Iraq. Before the initial U.S. attack, he said he was coming around to my point of view that war with Iraq was inadvisable. However, once it became a war, there was no dissuading him, plus, he believes it is ``unpatriotic'' to criticize the administration during ``wartime.'' I have yet to send him this Teddy Roosevelt quote:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt

Now, he sends me this. As far as I can see, Rumsfeld did not answer one question that was put to him. He is a notoriously bad extemporaneous speaker, anyway, as far as I can tell, almost as bad as Bush*. How do I respond to my friend? He is usually such a reasonable guy and very open-minded, but his training must cause him to be very conflicted about this illegal and bloody war.:shrug:

[Rhiannon12866]

3. Kick!

:kick:

[nuxvomica]

4. "...are you closer to catching Saddam today than you were yesterday?"

Rumsfeld: You know I’ve always fascinated by that question. It’s such a funny question. How can you know if you’re closer until you catch him, you can’t know, you get all these leads and all these suggestions and somebody says I think this or maybe he’s there and so you work it out and eventually if everything works out you catch him. And in this case we have not caught him, therefore we’re obviously are not close or we are close but we don’t know because we haven’t caught him. We’ll only know when he’s caught how close we were. We do know that we were close with respect to his sons.


This sophistry about you never knowing how close you are. * said the same at his PC. Is this a talking point with them now? It smells of the kind of besotted rhetoric that usually spews forth from Cheney's oral cavity. Like the frequently used absurd construction "gathering danger", Cheney's misappropriation of Churchill's poetry.

[Rhiannon12866]

5. I remember * saying this in his PC

I thought the same thing then as I did when reading the same nonsense coming from Rumsfeld. These guys have absolutely no idea what they're doing, so they spew (thanks, good word for this) all these words that mean nothing, but never answer the question. The thing that really gets to me is that no one ever calls them on it. The reporters, or, in this case, senators, act as if what they're saying makes perfect sense.:grr:

``We’ll only know when he’s caught how close we were.'' Huh?! And they let him get away with this?!:shrug: