Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Posts Tagged Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld For Press Secretary

Apr 20

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | 4 Comments

So President Bush needs a new press secretary, and Ed Driscoll has a couple of candidates. My own would be to have Don Rumsfeld slide over to take that position. Who better to do battle with the forces of darkness every day? Now that al qaida is on the run, he can turn his attention to islamofascism’s last bastion of support.

After watching him actually say “my goodness gracious” in response to a question from a reporter the other day at a press conference that was mainly about how some tough guy generals were complaining about how mean Rumsfeld was — a regular Dinsdale Piranha — I knew he was a black belt in verbal aikido. Of course he said it while the look on his face said “you are a moron who smells like stinky cheese, bigtime. And I mean bigtime on both the moron and the smell.” Since most communication is mostly non-verbal, you need a guy who can communicate so well both verbally and physically.

And the left would clearly like him, since they didn’t think McClellan was a good speaker, unlike Rumsfeld.

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Tempest Meet Teapot

Apr 20

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism | No Comments

Hugh Hewitt makes a good point about the media pushing the story about dissenting generals calling for Rumsfelds resignation:

Why are MSMers Broder and Dionne willing to assign such great credibility to a half dozen generals (out of at least 4,700 and perhaps as many as 7,000 retired gerenals and admirals) when there is no evidence that they have credited similar insider criticism of their own business, say from Bernard Goldberg, John Stossel and Michael Medved to name just three MSM-insiders turned MSM critics.

My news judgement tells me this is a popular story with the media only because they hate Rumsfeld (and the feeling is apparently mutual) and a perfect example of how the liberal media monoculture distorts not just the story, but story placement as well. Of course, I don’t bother with Broder and Dionne because (1) I already know their take on any given subject, and (2) it lacks depth and undertanding.

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We Just Disagree

Jan 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | No Comments

Donald Sensing and Jason Van Steenwyk look at the same Frederick Kagan article on Donald Rumsfeld and the war and have different views on it’s correctness. I think Jason presents the better arguments that Rumsfeld isn’t as bad as he’s made out to be.

Two quick interjections of my own — I think it’s wrong to claim that:
“The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America’s military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.”

The simple truth is that transformation of the Army is to fight the current war –the war against Islamofascism — not some far off war in the future. It’s just that it takes time, and is in fact harder to transform while fighting, but it is necessary. 

And I for one am getting a little tired of the whole “Shenseki warned us we’d need a lot more troops” for the simple reason that Shenseki’s intent wasn’t an honest assessment but just another in a long list of deliberately setting the requirements too high for action to occur. The Army doesn’t have the manpower to sustain the force levels Shenseki said it would take to take and hold Iraq – it can barely sustain the levels we are using. 

He and his Army predecessors always required too much and threw up too many roadblocks throughout the Clinton presidency and so the Army never took action — it was the Navy and Airforce in successful actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Navy in fruitlless cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afganistan. In Kosovo, when finally ordered to send in Apaches, the Army fiddled around with force protection and training issues long enough to keep their precious helicopters out of harm’s way. When Shenseki told the Bush adminstration his ridiculous estimate of the manpower and time requirements for any action in Afganistan, that was the end of Shenseki’s influence and the end to inaction. And if Shenseki was such a brilliant guy, why didn’t he push transformation in 1998 instead of WWII redux?

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Thoughts on Rumsfeld’s Memo

Oct 23

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Media Criticism, The War on Terror | No Comments

An invitation from Donald Rumsfeld to a high level strategy session was leaked yesterday. There were different opinions about it around the blogosphere. The spinning has reached frenzied yet utterly predicatable proportions. If you support the war, it’s a clear headed assessment. If you are against the war, it’s an admission of failure. No surprise then that I’m in the clear headed assessment camp.

One thing I haven’t seen picked up yet is the structure of the memo. It’s an invitation to a meeting to discuss what Rumsfeld learned from combat commanders about the following items: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough? He goes on to lay out the status quo, and then challanges his senior guys to figure out how they can do better. He’s consulted with the field commanders, and know he’s trying to get top leadership to address their concerns. So my reaction is good for Rumsfeld — he’s doing his job.

The press, however, isn’t doing theirs. Yesterday, this was all over the web. This morning when I opened my local newspaper, there was this lousy piece, which wasn’t much different than the original USA Today article. What I dislike about them is quite simple – they take a memo that flows and reduce it to a collection of sound bites. Why not just reprint the memo itself, and then they can include the reactions? Yeah, I know its on the web, and that’s how I know just how bad a job newspapers do. When I can read the darn memo myself, and then their reporting, you realize just how terrible their reporting is. I pity the poor fool who has to rely on the newsmedia to pre-digest the information they need.

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