Outchurched

Keith Olbermann takes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to task on the recent “fascism” comments Rumsfeld has been making, and he’s about as spot-on as one can get. I full agree that this issue “demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American.”

Elected officials at the top of the government of the United States are confusing themselves with God.

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

We end the countdown where we began, our #1 story, with a special comment on Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday. It demands the deep analysis and the sober contemplation of every American. For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence - indeed, the loyalty - of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land; worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants - our employees - with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; And not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq. It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile… it is right - and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For, in their time, there was another government faced with true peril - with a growing evil - powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the secret information. It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s - questioning their intellect and their morality.
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The complete video and transcript are available at Crooks and Liars.

This entry was posted by Rev. Dan on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Politics, Dominionism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.