Between the so-called insensitivity demonstrated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the bogus autopen “controversy,” there has been quite a bit of news about “the Donald” in the last week and a half.
The problem with the mainstream media is that so few of them are (or recognize) real men, that such foreign beings actually frighten them. Real men communicate with each other (and everyone else) without the…er…nuance that characterizes the exchanges between more neutered types. So when the SecDef says something like this to a National Guardsman,
As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. [bold mine]…the two men know the statements reflect a mere military axiom (regardless of whether the precipitating question was planted or not). However, the mainstream media types--and, unfortunately, some Republican US senators--who are more accoustomed to weasel-worded lip-biting drivel, squeal “Insensitivity to the Troops!” as if they gave a rat’s hairy behind about any of the troops. (Who was the last US Senator to visit the troops? Probably this one, ironically.) That the factual and mutually-understood statements were also lifted out of their more clarifying context is just gravy. (Okay, thinking of Christmas dinner makes my metaphors more…culinary.)
To add more babbling into the mix, Mr. Insensitivity jetted off for a Christmas Eve vacation to those known luxury spots: Mosul, Tikrit, Fallujah and Baghdad. How insensitive of him! Would that his critics were so “unfeeling.” (It's either his seventh or eighth trip to Iraq since March 2003.)
Speaking of insensitivity, has any of Mr. Rumsfeld’s more "empathetic" critics—especially those that brewed up the autopen BS—noticed anything about the SECDEF’s hands?
Does anyone remember how old Mr. Rumsfeld is?
Could it be that he was using an autopen to sign the letters because he has one of the most common ailments known to people over the age of seventy?
If Mr. Rumsfeld does suffer from arthritis, you can rest assured that he’d never tell it. He’ll just go on ahead and sign those letters, pain and all, for two reasons. First of all, he doesn’t appear to be the type of man who makes excuses for his weaknesses, physical or otherwise. The second reason, however, is far more important: he is keenly aware that, at the behest of his boss, he is sending men and women into the type of danger in which painful joints would be the most trivial of worries. (Here’s an account of a meeting between the secretary and an injured soldier in Mosul, which validates the second reason in a most graphic manner.)*
To paraphrase one of the soldiers interviewed regarding the visit, Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t have to bring his old, creaky, ornery, blunt self to Iraq *yet again,* but he did. (And he and his wife don’t have to visit the injured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, but they do—minus the prying eyes of the mainstream media.) Additionally, he honors those who didn’t have to sign up to defend our way of life, but did. One way that he does this is by speaking to them as one speaks to an equal: honestly. And, from all accounts, most of them love him for it. Real men recognize other real men on sight and shake hands looking into each others eyes; if only to make sure that neither is drawing a weapon more lethal than an inkpen.
Merry Christmas.
*I wonder what the SECDEF coin looks like!
