Intellectual freedom is the only guarantee of a
scientific - democratic approach to politics, economic development, and
culture.
-Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov-
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-Benjamin Franklin-
Mark Adams is [in no particular order] a Lawyer, Restauranteur, Husband, Father, Grandfather, Landlord, Singer, Guitarist, Political Scientist, Amateur Historian and Rhetorician with no sense of reverence for anything except the freedom to speak one's mind. To visit Mark's Family Law Website
Arianna Huffington takes SecDef Rumsfeld to task for just making shit up.
First Rummy bitches about people and the press not putting things in historical perspective, forgetting their history, then he unleashes a volley of claptrap "facts" that simply defy logic or a cursory google check:
"There's never been a popular war." Wrong. Support for WWII never went below 75%
"Franklin Roosevelt was one of the most hated people in the country." Wrong. FDR's approval during the war never went below 66%, disapproval didn't get above 25%.
"Harry Truman went out of office with 23% popularity in the polls." Wrong, he rebounded to 32% by the end and did go to historical lows at 23% but rebounded. It's still pretty bad, even for a guy who used a couple of weapons of mass destruction. But Rummy's boss was at 58% just before Iraq. Truman's was at a dismal 37% before Korea -- which is where he was in February of the second year after getting reelected, not much above Bush's current 34%. Bush dropped a lot more than Truman during their respective wars, and when you consider the near 90% approval Bush had at the end of 2001, free-fall would be a kind description. Nixon was getting us out of Vietnam by this point in his presidency, but his rating was 24%.
"George Washington was almost fired." Here's where Rummy really jumps the shark. Washington was almost fired before there was even a United States. To fire a sitting president you need to impeach him and Washington was never in any danger of that kind of disapproval while in office -- and popularity had nothing to do with Clinton's impeachment. Slick Willie actually gained in popularity while the Republican hatchet men lined up to throw spit-balls at him.
But what is most amusing is not that Rumsfeld doesn't know what he doesn't know, but that he now is trying to make the whole nonsense unknowable:
Soon after I posted about Rummy's "biggest problem" quote and linked to the DoD website, the entire interview suddenly vanished from the site. It's disappeared from the list of recent transcripts, and the page where the interview once was is now completely blank.
