Intellectual cowardice

Angry pro-Rumsfeld email in San Diego

This post by Chris Reed from a blog at the very conservative San Diego Union-Tribune popped up in Google News yesterday while I was looking at reaction to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's garrulous speech before the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City:

Rumsfeld's despicable tirade
Oh, yeah, people like William F. Buckley and George Will, they're akin to Nazi appeasers.

Rumsfeld should be ashamed. Lots of people, me included, loathe the Daily Kossacks for comparing Bush to Hitler. Now Rumsfeld compares critics of Bush's record running the Iraq war -- a group that includes not just lefties but Buckley, Will, major right-wing think tanks, John McCain, Chuck Hagel and much of Bush Sr.'s foreign-policy team -- to Nazi appeasers.

This is disgraceful.

Now Reed has attracted an ``angry email reaction'':

why don't you go live in Iran? Join up with the terrorists that will eventually try to murder you, your wife and children. Then we'll see how nice they are. To bad there is not some immediate consequence for liberals like you who try to lead our county into chaos. I guess that's free America in lieu of YOUR Iran! You are disgraceful!

When literate conservatives like Reed are piled on by an unwashed reactionary rabble who screech that ``you're either for Bush or for terrorism'', this tells you something about how Cheney and Rumsfeld think they can get away with their dishonest discourse. The mob to which they appeal possess an ``intellectual cowardice'' for saying that ``all critics are commies'' while being unable to accept that ``giants of the right'' like Will and Buckley are turning sour on the president. Sheesh...

Meanwhile, Fred Kaplan at Slate has a detailed and useful analysis of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's week of maddness, with special reference to the ``four questions'':

Kaplan: The fifth anniversary of 9/11 looms before us, and it's hard to say which artifact is gloomier: the awful memory of the attack itself (especially to those of us who witnessed the towers crumbling) or the spectacle of our leaders wrapping themselves in its legacy as if it were some tattered shroud that sanctifies their own catastrophic mistakes and demonizes all their critics.

I can't wait for President Bush to bring his own special kind of vapid intellectual cowardice to the American Legion convention later today.

Update: Ooops. Below I had Rumsfeld speaking to the VFW. The speech actually took place at the American Legion convention. Appropriate corrections have been made. Second update: I think I finally fixed all of the misinformation about the location of Rumsfeld's speech.