Frank Rich: Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis

[question everything]

(Apologies if posted previously)

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/02/frank-rich-donald-rumsfelds-dance-with-the-nazis/

[NYCGirl]

1. Frank Rich is a gem! He nailed it. NT

[tavalon]

2. Politicians dance with them that brung them

It's a Molly Ivin's paraphrase and quite apropos here.

Rumsfeld should know a Nazi when he sees one, don't you think?

[chat_noir]

3. Rumsfeld's Faulty Memory. The Frank Rich Smackdown!

The Master of punditry, Frank Rich, takes Rumsfeld to task for claiming that critics of the war have little historical perspective. We're all a bunch of appeasers and otherwise cousins of Neville Camberlain.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/2/214323/6200





Chamberlain and Hitler

[question everything]

5. Thank you. The comparison is stunning

yet, these people with deaf ears, will never get it. "With us it was different."

Like the good old "the rich are different from you and me."

[SpiralHawk]

4. What about the Bush clan financing Hitler and the Nazis?

I wonder why Rich paid no attention to how the Bush clan -- Prescott Bush -- made massive war profits from giving bank money to Hitler and the Nazis and thereby enabling them to build weapons to kill millions, including hundred of thousands of American soldiers?

There's only one word for the Bush-Nazi connection: Treason.

And it is FACT. Look it up.

[RedEarth]

6. . K&R