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the rumsfeld quote is pretty funny--i remember the opposite argument being floated by 1972 republicans to justify the coup d'etat in chile.
i wonder if it is a curious unguarded comment from rumsfeld, however, one that gives a glimpse of the mode of rationalization he uses to understand the actions over which he has presided as sec. of defense. typically for conservative ideologues, such admissions, when they come, are framed as moments of projection--which is a recurrent tic of right ideology--if the right is doing something, you always find the apparatus imputing that thing to their (usually hallucinated) inverse, be that "the left" in america or "terrorists" in the bigger imaginary world of the bush administration, or in iraq.
the point is that i see how the logic of host's posts above works, but i simply don't think about its implications in the same way. it is pretty clear that the lynchpin of the post is the second quote, which sets up the questions that he ends with.
what interests me in post no. 4 is the term "bush bashing" which seems little more than a rhetorical device for trivializing critique of this administration. it seems like the object of the game that surrounds use of it is to reduce criticisms of bush and his merry band to some kind of strange emotional reaction on the part of those who oppose the adminsitration in particular, the far right in general, by stripping away the factual content of the critiques and thereby setting up an excuse to dismiss them. but you would think that there would come a point where this device would cease to operate, that the increasing mountain of evidence of the administration's various lies, their various abuses, their various idiocies, would begin to register even with the most ardent bushfan.
what surprises me is that most conservatives i talk with in 3-d lilfe are reasonable people--not fools who are lead by the nose--they are certainly far more complex and sophisticated in real life than they are in messageboards---nonetheless, in certain situations these folk simply shut down, cannot process what they are being told by folk who oppose their politics. that is when the bush bashing term generally comes up. it is as if the term really operates to prevent these people from having to think too much about the limitations of their position, the problems with the administration that purports to represent them. it is as if they cannot cope with the dissonance that separates who they would prefer to think george w bush is and what he stands for and what the actual administration that operates in his name does in the world. this mechanism is particular to the right--there is nothing similar outside of it, except maybe amongst certain trotskyites. generally folk are able to navigate the problems that arise when an administration betrays what people who might have supported it at one point thought it was about--you might consider how folk to the left of the dlc reacted to clinton-the-centrist...none of this denial business, with all its pathetic implications..more a considered withdrawing of consent....you might consider the reaction of the left at the point where you might have been able to argue that it existed in a coherent sense to johnson's escalation of vietnam: none of this denial stuff, with all its pathetic implications, but a rapid withdrawal of consent and the formation of oppositional movements.
a very strange place, the world of the contemporary american right.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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