Talkers Circle The Wagons For Rummy

by Steve Young

Loyalty. It's a wonderful thing. Not necessarily brimming with integrity, but wonderful just the same. And damn fun.

On this past Thursday's O'Reilly Factor, Fox's John Gibson, subbing for Bill, said that he "would not join the chorus battering Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld," because of what they would say. "They," he suggested, was meant to cover all those who said the Rove-driven campaign truths may have been a bit skewed. That things hadn't gone as well over the past four years as "they" and "us" were led to believe. That "we" were fed enough bull-excrement to kill the bull, along with quite a few U.S. soldiers. That if that truth were be known, President Bush may not have been elected.

Lovin' it. The same guys who derided Kerry for flip-flopping (I still can't get over just how knee-slapping funny that was even the ten-thousandths time they used it), during that campaign. My guess is that flip-flopping after the campaign shows much more core-valueÊcharacterÊthan offering so-called changes before the voter makes his or her decision. Don't want to mix up those poor ignorant Blues with too many facts.

Ironic, ain't it, that the calls for Rumsfeld exit before the election were being led by the evil partisan MoveOn.org, and the post-election voices are coming from such evil leftie partisans as Republicans John McCain, Trent Lott, Norm Coleman and William Crystal.

Has Rumsfeld's performance fallen so dramatically since November's mandate victory? Or, oh God, please don't tell me, that the truth these Republicans knew and felt so deeply that they would now even confess it to those lying, elite bastards of the liberal media, was known to them prior to the election, and that McCain and the boysÊthought they couldn't trust the voter to be armed with the facts.

Nah. That's just shadow-conspiracy stuff.

If true, and I realize this is just wild speculation, but if they did actually feel this way prior to the election, what an absolute insult. Not an insult to those who believed Rumsfeld to be incompetent, but to those who voted on the basis of what they thought the truth; that laden with the overwhelming weight of reality the blueish voter might not be able to make the right decision, as far as those handing out the distortions consider to be the right decision. It would be grievous shame to find that those running our country felt that misleading the electorate just to be elected is appropriate policy. After all, isn't what they decried as the practice of the deceitful Democrats.

Of course, I could be just jumping to conclusions here. It's one of the things I do best. Perhaps it was Rumsfeld's after-the-election response to the soldier who made the "we could use more body armor" comment. The Secretary's "We go to war with the army we have, not the army we want" answer may have ruffled the feathers of some politicos. Not so talk show lovely Sean Hannity, who jumped on the real news...that the soldier was fed the question by an diabolic reporter.

Sean didn't say whether the cheers among the troops in attendanceÊthat went up in response to the soldier's question, were fed to the men by a reporter.

Ever the diligent infotainer, Sean investigated further to discover that we have more armored Humvees now than we had when we first invaded to save Iraq from itself. Sean made us all feel a little bit safer by assuringÊlisteners that, "once road roadside bombs starting killing our soldiers we began to process more body armor." Garsh. It makes sense. Having the armor in place before our kids were killed would be like saying we should have known that there were no WMD before we invaded.

As far as Rumsfeld's response? Sean submitted for those of us unfamiliar with the inner-workings of the Defense Department, that perhaps Rumsfeld "did not have this information at his fingertips" when the reporter-fed soldier asked the question. Thank God we do have the Lords of Loud out there digging up the Defense (of the Defense Department?) Department intelligence so that the Bush Administration or the CIA needn't exert their own information-gathering muscle. I'm sure they needed to save as much energy as they could to lug around the massive gall the president demonstrated in presenting George Tenet with the Medal of Freedom award.