A disgraceful speech

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld gave a speech to the American Legion yesterday that I found simply disgraceful. I don't think the word is too strong, and here's why.

Here's part of the speech:

We need to face the following questions:

+ With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?
+ Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
+ Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?
+ And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America -- not the enemy -- is the real source of the world’s trouble?

These are central questions of our time. And we must face them.

Those are central questions, but who, exactly, is posing them? Who in this country, other than the Chomsky-Kos-Sheehan crowd, really believes that America is the real source of the world's trouble? Which serious person in American public life is proposing negotiating a separate peace with terrorists? The SecDef is setting up straw men to portray his critics, and critics of the way he and this administration have fought the Iraq War, as lily-livered Chamberlains. Prior to stating the above passage, he brought up the specter of 1938, and Hitler, just so the audience would get the message that either you're with this administration, or you're on the side of Islamo-Hitlers. Never mind that there are an increasing number of conservatives and others who are quite willing to fight the good fight against the Islamofascist menace, but who think Team Rummy has done so incompetently. It is possible to be a loyal soldier in the war on Islamist terror, and to dissent loyally from the present leadership.

Anyway, Rumsfeld goes on to say:

But this is still -- even in 2006 -- not well recognized or fully understood. It seems that in some quarters there is more of a focus on dividing our country, than acting with unity against the gathering threats.

We find ourselves in a strange time:

When a database search of America’s leading newspapers turns up 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib who were punished for misconduct, than mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror;

When a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our Armed Forces as a “mercenary army”;

When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists and the former CNN Baghdad bureau chief [Note: this was actually former CNN president Eason Jordan] admits he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein’s crimes when he was in power so CNN could stay in Iraq; and

It is a time when Amnesty International disgracefully 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.”

Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths, and distortions being told about our troops and about our country.

The struggle we are in is too important -- the consequences too severe -- to have the luxury of returning to the old mentality of “Blame America First.”

This is such clumsy, blame-the-messenger propaganda one can hardly believe that at this late stage in the Iraq War someone of Rumsfeld's intelligence and sophistication stoops to using it. The news media, by bringing us reports of Bad Things Happening in Iraq, are lying and aiding and abetting the enemy. They hate America, even!

If you think about it, this speech is almost quaint in its ham-fistedness, it's red-meatiness, its complete disconnection from reality. Who is still persuaded by stuff like this? Anybody?