mkitch:

I strongly recommend that everyone watch Donald Rumsfeld’s interview from last night on the Daily Show. I had the unique privilege of watching this play out live on the shared feed from the Daily Show to the Colbert Report control room and I think it’s an important interview for anyone with misgivings about the original circumstances of us going into Iraq (i.e. everyone hopefully).

It goes on for a good 20 minutes and it is worth watching in full. 

As I watched, it felt like this would be Jon Stewart’s “Frost/Nixon” moment. A few times he had Rummy backed into a corner but the man is so slippery and slick that he was always able to weasel his way out. I think it’s because it’s very difficult to get someone who doesn’t believe that they’re lying or wrong to admit to lying or incriminate themselves.

Well done Mr. Stewart, you almost had him. 

It’s watching Donald Rumsfeld dance around questions that is so damning of the last administration. But you can tell, when he answers a question, he really does mean it. He and the major players of the Bush administration really did think they were going to make the world a better place once Saddam Hussein was out of the picture. They hoped that it could be done safely and quickly and believed in the power of the American military. But they used those convictions as an excuse to lie to the American people and gain the popular support needed to start a war. 

The Bush administration didn’t trust the American people to come to the same conclusions with the same information that they reached. So they changed the story and hoped for the best. What a nightmare it must have been for Rumsfeld to see his “parade of horribles” coming true, and how he’d never be able to just say that they were lying to the people to protect the greater good. 

The ignorant middle American is a dying breed. It’s not because more people are moving “to the coast,” as Rumsfeld puts it. It is because powerful ideas can reach you anywhere in the country, and knowledge is the highest commodity. The Tea Party and birthers and the like have been able to thrive in isolation for decades. And while right wing extremism is reaches a boiling point, we know that as a society, we have always moved to create new freedoms and progress civilization. The violent stupidity that exists today and shames us as Americans is merely the death rattle of the ignorant class. 

Source: mkitch