With the sweep, grandeur and sheer volume of the profoundly stupid things that Bush Administration officials come up with almost daily, the one positive contribution is that there is never a dearth of material for critical commentary. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld met with reporters and put a hobnailed boot in his mouth without even realizing the stupidity of his comments. Consider the fact that the Bush administration is embroiled in multiple scandals involving corruption at the highest levels. It goes beyond the influence peddling with Jack Abramoff and the deliberate leaking of the identity of Valerie Plame to politically punish her husband for publicly disagreeing with the President's agenda. The corruption includes the "conspiracy to wage aggrssive war" that resulted in the invasion, decimation and occupation of Iraq. It also includes the deliberate circumvention of Congress, the law and the Constitution to engage in domestic spying.
Now consider the following comments from the lips of Rumsfeld, referring to Latin America:
“We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy.”
Perhaps the Secretary of Defense never had a parent to admonish him about the proverbial "pot calling the kettle black." There is no doubt that certain levels of corruption have existed in government regimes in South Amerca and throughout the world. But to date, none of the corruption in South America has reached the levels displayed by the Bush Administration in terms of hundreds of millions of public dollars siphoned off to Halliburton and wasted through bribes and plain mismanagement, and the totally unnecessary loss of thousands of lives. Mr. Rumsfeld would do well to tend his own garden and shore up the glass walls in his own house before venturing out publicly to throw stones at others far less culpable.
Since he believed that he was on a roll, as most fools do when given too much public attention, Rumsfeld proceeded to liken President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to Adolf Hitler. Whatever you might say about Chavez, you cannot accuse him of armed invasion of another sovereign country, killing thousands of that country's innocent civilians, attacking civilians with napalm like chemical weapons and systematically torturing prisoners and holding them indefinitely without charges or right to even allow the Red Cross to see them. No, I am not referring to Adolf Hitler. I am referring to the US Military under the direct leadership and orders of Donald Rumsfeld. Whether because of ignorance or arrogance, or both, Rumsfeld asserted a comparison that applies more to his own conduct than that of Hugo Chavez.
The recent news revealed minutes from a meeting between Tony Blair and George W. Bush in which Bush proposed sending drone planes over Iraq, fraudulently painted with UN colors, to provoke Hussein's soldiers to fire upon the drones and thereby provide "justification" for a UN resolution against Iraq. But Bush further told Blair that he planned to attack Iraq regardless of provocation or UN resolution, acknowledging that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. Rumsfeld and Bush in their "conspiracy to wage aggressive war" should remind us of a tribunal held about 40 years ago in Nurenburg Germany. For that conduct represented the first of four charges leveled against the Nazi war criminals, including Rumsfeld's counterpart Hermann Goehring. My parents told me to be careful when pointing a finger, because there would be three fingers of my own pointing right back at me. Another important lesson of youth that seems to have escaped Rumsfeld.
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