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Rumsfeld NO Compassionate Conservative

WoodPeckr

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Surprise Surprise Rummy's in the Dog House AGAIN

His callous arrogance towards troops who have died for his policies has no limits. This is typical of those GWB surrounds himself with, as GWB claims Rummy "is doing a spectacular job"......

Lawmakers Chide Rumsfeld for Auto-Signed Sympathy Letters

Sun Dec 19, 2:46 PM ET
Politics - Reuters

By Jackie Frank

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not personally sign his name on letters of condolence to families of troops killed in Iraq but instead had it done by a machine, an action lawmakers said on Sunday showed insensitivity and was inappropriate for leadership during war.

Rumsfeld acknowledged that he had not signed the letters to family members of more than 1,000 U.S. troops killed in action and in a statement said he would now sign them in his own hand. "This issue of the secretary of Defense not personally signing the letters is just astounding to me and it does reflect how out of touch they are and how dismissive they are," Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"I have no confidence in Rumsfeld," Hagel added.

Rumsfeld has been under strong fire from Democrats and some Republicans recently for appearing to brush off concerns of soldiers about the lack of protective equipment in Iraq.

But President Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card emphasized White House support for Rumsfeld on Sunday.

He "is doing a spectacular job, and the president has great confidence in him," Card told ABC's "This Week" program.

Hagel noted that the families of the troops killed in Iraq have received letters signed by Bush.

"My goodness, that is the least we can expect the secretary of Defense ... If the president can find the time to do that why can't the secretary of Defense?" said Hagel, who has been a sharp critic of the way Bush has handled the Iraq war.

Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island said family members of those killed, "would like to think that at least for a moment the secretary thought about individually this young man or this young woman."

"Again it shows a lack of leadership style appropriate for the military ... This goes to his capability to continue to serve."

However, Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said that while "this is another area in which the secretary is being insensitive," the action did not "go to his leadership."

AUTOPEN RETIRED

"I wrote and approved the now more than 1,000 letters sent to family members and next of kin of each of the servicemen and women killed in military action," Rumsfeld said in a statement on Sunday."

"While I have not individually signed each one, in the interest of ensuring expeditious contact with grieving family members, I have directed that in the future I sign each letter."

Rumsfeld got himself into trouble earlier this month by appearing to brush off a soldier headed to Iraq who complained that military vehicles did not have sufficient armor and troops were having to piece together scraps of metal for extra protections.

Some prominent Republicans including Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott have questioned his performance, leading the White House to come to his defense on Friday with a statement that he was "doing a great job."

Among the critics, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar expressed concern on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that removing him from office could threaten national security.

"He should be held accountable and he should stay in office," the Indiana Republican senator said. "The fact is a change of leadership in the Pentagon at this point might be as disruptive as trying to get someone in Homeland Defense," he added.

Military families told the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which first carried the story, that the machine-signed letters reflected a lack of respect for the losses the families had suffered.

"To me it's an insult, not only as someone who lost a loved one but also as someone who served in Iraq," Army Spc. Ivan Medina whose brother Irving was killed in Iraq this summer, told the newspaper.

link:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...nm/20041219/pl_nm/defense_rumsfeld_letters_dc

Welcome to Bush's AmeriKKKA!!!
 

zydeco

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It won't be today or tomorrow - but his days as Defence Sec. are numbered. They just have to wait for the right time.
 

Asterix

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Don't be so sure. Bush in his last press conference of the year finally admitted the insurgency was having a significant impact, and that the Iraqi's were not at any time soon, ready to take over security. He needs a fall guy. Powell is gone. Who else but Rumsfeld?
 

langeweile

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In a van down by the river
Asterix said:
Don't be so sure. Bush in his last press conference of the year finally admitted the insurgency was having a significant impact, and that the Iraqi's were not at any time soon, ready to take over security. He needs a fall guy. Powell is gone. Who else but Rumsfeld?
Right or wrong he will have to take the fall. The 30th of January is a deadline. Bush wasn't going to change horses in mid stream, it would create too many problems.
After the 30th, the line "we will open a new chapter" is the sell line.
Hopefully we are planning to move out, shortly after that day. if there will be no stabilization, the public pressure for decisive action will mount.
I am a Bush supporter, but we have grossly misscalculated the "after war" issues.
Whatever the outcome will be, we are going to have to live with it.If we like it or not. Will it be perfect...hell no, but it is a start.
 

zydeco

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Time will tell bbking - but I think you're on the wrong side of this one.
 

Asterix

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I doubt he'd choose Wolfowitz. Bush needs someone outside of the inner circle who hasn't been tainted by this mess. What's really scary is that the administration seems to be putting all it's hopes on the January election. The silence about how preparations are going to hold and provide security for the election is deafening.

Another crappy day in Iraq. Twenty plus soldiers and contract workers killed in a rocket attack while they ate lunch in an open mess tent. Sadder still that the soldiers had earlier espressed their fears of being vulnerable to just such an attack while they all ate together. Looks like Rumsfeld has some more signing to do.
 

WoodPeckr

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A state of chaos

George Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Guardian

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.

"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.

Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.

Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.

Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."

The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."

In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.

Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.

The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com
 

onthebottom

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That's a balanced artical! LOL

I think Condi has her work cut out for her, 75% of the career staff in her org wanted the other guy to win - they will be waiting a long time for a Democrat master.

OTB
 
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