Rumsfeld to resign

[Kuciwalker]

[Thedrin]

I would rather have 10 bad ideas and then a brilliant idea, than to have no ideas at all.

I'd rather have no ideas, than have 10 bad ideas and then a brilliant idea and not be able to distinguish between them.

[MOBIUS]

Another case of Bush cutting and running?

I mean it was only days after Mr Bush had vowed to 'stay the course' with Dumbsfeld until the end of his term in January 2009.

[Mr. Harley]

LOTM - I just couldn't resist a quick peak at Apolyton (I ended up with one of those continuous blood pressure monitor things and discovered what my BP was doing while I was on OT, which is largely why I vanished), and I am stuck at home with a nasty chest cold, though my going to vote with that doesn't hold a candle to your efforts - maybe the Dem's won because you weren't so f*cked up, think about it, maybe YOU control the destiny of the nation - I wasn't so much aiming my statement at you, you were willing to at least listen. It's just that I said it from the very beginning (remember the Rumsfeld "Man of the Year" thread) and sadly, history has proven my more than correct on every misgiving I had over Iraq, Bush, and Rumsfeld. I wish I could take more pleasure from being right. Kismet.

[Pekka]

Not necessarily. I mean not necessarily a case of cut and run. Rumsfeld, if he had any sense, would have now resigned anyway. WHy do you want to be the burden, the stone in the shoe, sometimes you just need to step down, even if you think you were guilty of something or not.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Pekka
Not necessarily. I mean not necessarily a case of cut and run. Rumsfeld, if he had any sense, would have now resigned anyway. WHy do you want to be the burden, the stone in the shoe, sometimes you just need to step down, even if you think you were guilty of something or not.

To be fair to Rummy, he tendered his resignation on a number of occasions to Bush. (if memory serves immediately after Abu Ghraib for one) Bush simply told him he wouldn't accept it.

Not that he shouldn't have been told to leave after his old europe insult before any of this happened.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Re: Another case of Bush cutting and running?

Originally posted by MOBIUS
I mean it was only days after Mr Bush had vowed to 'stay the course' with Dumbsfeld until the end of his term in January 2009.

Moby finally wins the prize with incontrovertible truth that Bush Lied.

In other news stopped clocks shown to be correct approximately 2 times per day.

[MOBIUS]

Re: Re: Another case of Bush cutting and running?

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Moby finally wins the prize with incontrovertible truth that Bush Lied.

In other news stopped clocks shown to be correct approximately 2 times per day.

Why do you guys insist on doing these things to yourselves!!?

That post makes you look like a dumbass from about every possible angle...

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


WHOOSH... that's why it'd be offered to Libermann, to get him to leave his position as Senator.

You may need to spell it out a bit more for those not following.


and......


The Connecticut GOP governor would then be .............


required to ........


appoint a replacement Senator......


Which would likely be .............


a republican.....


Giving the Senate......


back to the republicans......


by virtue of .......


the Cheney tie breaker.....

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Thedrin


I'd rather have no ideas, than have 10 bad ideas and then a brilliant idea and not be able to distinguish between them.

That presumes a brilliant idea.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
To be fair to Rummy, he tendered his resignation on a number of occasions to Bush. (if memory serves immediately after Abu Ghraib for one) Bush simply told him he wouldn't accept it.

if you REALLY want to resign, noone can stop you....

[Ramo]

President Bush’s pick to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates is an odd one, considering it’s almost certain to revive festering questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Gates is one of those longtime Washington insiders whose name is not likely to ring bells outside of the Beltway.

But he’s long been a major player in Republican national security circles, first as a Russian specialist on President Gerald Ford’s White House National Security Council in 1974, then eventually at the CIA, where he held a handful of senior positions before being tapped to be its chief by the first President Bush, in 1991.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated for the post — or his first dose of trouble in the spotlight.

In early 1987, his role in the so-called Iran-Contra affair, a secret White House operation to sell weapons to radical Islamic Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages — and cash for CIA-backed rebels in Nicaragua — came under scrutiny.

Gates withdrew his nomination in the face of sure rejection.

Then, in during his 1991 nomination hearings to run the CIA, Gates ran into a buzz saw of testimony from a former agency analyst who said that during the 1980s Gates had skewered intelligence to fit the convictions of senior Reagan administration officials that Soviet agents had concocted a plot to assassinate the pope and were arming and encouraging Marxist revolutionary groups to carry out terrorist attacks.

Both theories turned out to be wrong, according Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, who headed a team of CIA analysts assigned the task of investigating the theory.

While Moscow boasted of its backing for such revolutionary groups as Yassar Arafat’s PLO, which was fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, it privately urged them not to engage in terrorism, Ekedalh said.

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said during Gates 1991 confirmation hearings to head the CIA. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.” [Nomination of Robert M. Gates, Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, Volume III]

But Gates, then head of CIA analysis, was dissatisfied with her draft, Ekedahl said, and helped rewrite it with an angle “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism.”

In From the Shadows, a memoir published in 1996, Gates conceded that his boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was hostile to anything less than a finding of Soviet support for terrorism, including the attempt on the life of the pope, which turned out to be the act of a deranged Bulgarian.

“The first draft by the analysts proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig had exaggerated the Soviet role — that the Soviets did not organize or direct international terrorism,” Gates wrote, adding that Casey had refused to pass it along to the White House.

The careers of anyone who disagreed with the views of Casey, channeled by Gates, suffered, according to Ekedalh and another analyst who testified at Gates’s confirmation hearing.

Senior former CIA analyst Mel Goodman charged Gates with a number of improprieties, including “the imposition of intelligence judgments, often over the protests of the consensus in the Directorate of Intelligence, to slant intelligence . . . suppression of intelligence that didn’t support the Casey agenda . . . (and) use of the Directorate of Operations to slant intelligence of the Directorate of Intelligence.”

The charges were almost identical to those that would be raised against Bush administration officials, a number of whom held high positions in the Reagan and first Bush administrations — Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, in particular.

http://www.cq.com/public/20061108_homeland.html

Where does the Admin get so many corrupt hacks from? He's an improvement over Rummy, but that's not exactly a high bar to meet.

[MrFun]

The corrupt hacks go back to Bush's blithe sound-bite during his 2000 campaign. It's all about restoring honor and dignity to the White House.