Donald Rumsfeld Loudly Harangued At White House Correspondents' Dinner (VIDEO)

This video has been making the rounds, but in case you haven't seen it, here's Donald Rumsfeld getting shouted at by Desiree Fairooz and Medea Benjamin of the ubiquitous protest organization known as Code Pink. I gather that the big takeaway is that, in Code Pink's estimation, Donald Rumsfeld is a "war criminal." But don't take my word for it! Maybe my impression is based in a flawed parsing of all this subtlety.

[WATCH.]

Naturally, I'm not a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld, or the Iraq War strategy, or the foreign policy -- if it can be called that -- that came out of the Bush White House. And, on principle, I'm sort of okay with messing around with the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Nevertheless, I find it hard to divine the value of Code Pink yelling at Rumsfeld in this setting. In the first place, there's the pointlessness: the Beltway press are fully on board with "looking forward, not backward," and preserving comity, and not troubling their pretty little minds with the hurtful thoughts of the people they cover going to jail. And I promise you, this yelling at Donald Rumsfeld will only harden their position in this regard. But more to the point, I've watched Code Pink shout at Al Gore, of all people, at Netroots Nation, of all places, as he was explaining his national environmental policy initiative, of all the things to shout down. When you basically go out and disrupt EVERYTHING, it's hard to know where you stand on ANYTHING.

So, yeah, I find this stuff relentlessly unimpressive, but I've also found that plenty of people object to me saying so. Just like the Tea Parties! I nevertheless believe that just as crisis demands we not abandon our principles, our response to crisis demands we at least attempt to preserve a measure of dignity. And with that, everyone can start, you know, TOTALLY YELLING AT ME.

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Comments

[SteveDenver]

Why in he!! is Rumsfeld at the correspondent's dinner under this administration? Good for Desiree and Medea, maybe Rumsfeld will think twice about leaving his house. They were disruptive and warranted being removed, but Rumsfeld is a war criminal and should be tried.

Someone shout at his wife: "Aren't you ashamed to be on the arm of a man with blood on his hands?"

[RJII]

i'd like to buy these two women the first round. congrats and thanks for representing me well.

[JoeLosFeliz]

I agree. The man is beyond disgusting.

[kankan]

Teabaggers? No, let's call them Red Tamponers

[rsprags]

Confrontation is difficult sometimes to perform and to see when you don't understand that it reduces strife and lead to peace!

[marthainmaine]

Guess I won't be reading Jason's run down of the Sunday Shows. Timing is off . He could have gotten away with this worthless blog two months ago. Not today.

[rsprags]

Sad this guys were in charge of U.S. military; no wonder torture and other misbehavior occurred from the top down

[felixthecat]

Jason Linkins is a fool to criticize Code Pink, more people should shout war criminal when he is seen. this war criminal has no conscience and is enjoying dinner while young Americans are fighting for a War that HE STARTED.

[TJustSaying]

Jason Links is telling us to stop being crabs in a bucket basically pulling each other down. These women did not help the cause but simple gave the Republicans some free talking points.

[disgusted48]

code pink helped the cause because whenever dick cheyney and don rumsfeld are out in public they should be called out on their crimes,this may be their only punishment. why should they be happy. go code pink. I will be donating funds to your cause, very brave, very impressive.

[PaiaGirl]

So War Criminal Donald Rumsfeld thinks it is FUNNY to have people publicly call him that?

How long do we have to wait to see these criminals prosecuted?

How long can Cheney and Rumsfeld walk around with impunity promoting torture?

[LiamR]

Why Rumsfield, Bush, and Cheney are not in jail is beyond me. Our silence around these war criminals is the real outrage. It's ironic that Rumsfeld can march into the Washington correspondents event unscathed during the same week that an 89-year-old Nazi war criminal was finally deported back to Germany. I pray that American justice will some day prevail.

[commentsareus]

The damage this man in particular has caused not just America, but the entire world is nearly unfathomable. I am surprised he hasn't been tarred and feathered [or at least arrested].

[graphicnovel]

What unfathomable damage has this man done to the world? I'm not being coy, I just must have missed it, and I really want to know.

[commentsareus]

You're not going to get it from fox news..

[disgusted48]

he mismanaged a war for five years before he was fired by bush, duh.

[commentsareus]

from Tomgram: Roger Morris, Donald Rumsfeld's Long March. " Rumsfeld seeded the Middle East for future crises and, even more insidiously, joined the military leadership in cravenly abandoning the post-Vietnam battlefield of historical understanding and institutional change.

In his first days in office, he quickly allied himself with the longtime efforts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stall the pending Strategic Arms Control Agreement with Moscow. He also pushed Kissinger and Ford into one of the more disgraceful acts of that presidency the assuring of the Indonesian military junta that U.S. support and arms would continue to flow, despite the brutal suppression about to be unleashed on East Timor.

It was only a taste of the Rumsfeld preference for uniformed right-wing tyrants, indulged over the next year in an ever closer Defense Department liaison with military dictatorships in Latin America, most notably through Operation Condor, joint covert actions involving several regimes, among them Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile and the Argentine military dictatorship, with Pentagon attaches and intelligence advisors looking on approvingly. The result was a plague of kidnappings, disappearances, and assassinations throughout the Hemisphere, including, in 1976, the brazen car bomb murder of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Washington. Unfailingly backed and expanded by Rumsfeld, the collusion with Indonesian and Latin American despots underwrote more than a decade of some of the most savage repressions of the second half of the twentieth century."

[LiamR]

Where to begin....why don't you do a little research? You could start with the Wikipedia entry on Rumsfeld which is fairly balanced and which includes such information as:

"Run-up to Iraq

Rumsfeld also made many public statements regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, weapons which were never found."

The Wikipedia Rumsfeld entry can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

While Bush and Cheney (and Wolfiwitz,Pearl, and many others) were involved in the deceptive campaign to push American troops into Iraq, Rumsfeld was the person who implemented this tragedy by ignoring his generals, coercing the military into believing there were weapons of mass destruction to be found, and generally mismanaging the war right down to the insufficient armoring of our troops.

He also called for torture, tried to hide the abuse of military and contract personnel in Iraq, and showed total disregard for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

But in the end, of course, you are free to believe whatever you want to believe.

[PuppaX]

Jason -

What do you feel someone would have to do to merit being publicly scorned? The problem isn't the two people yelling at him; it's the fact that the rest of us aren't. Why should he ever deserve even a moment of peace?

[Bernique]

hear, hear, Puppa.

[twintwine]

But what does publicly scorning somebody merit? What does it actually affect in the case of Rumsfeld. To make his life stressful for him? At some point that is just moderately agreeing with Rumsfeld's ethos.

[Wozzeck]

Lose the attitude. Code Pink has cojones. Do you?

[DrJay1966]

I don't call it "over the top," and I don't care if Donald Rumsfeld felt harassed or if it ruined his evening. I call it counterproductive. These women are doing nothing but preaching to the choir and , if anything, scaring away anyone who's unconvinced or uninformed about the subject.

Those who are praising these women here should try, for just a moment, to put themselves in the mindset of someone who doesn't already agree that Rumsfeld is a war criminal--perhaps someone who has no opinion on the subject, or possibly is sympathetic to Rumsfeld but might be still have an open mind on the subject.

Now, watch the video again. Kind of looks like a dignified old man being harangued by a bunch of shrill lunatics, doesn't it? Most likely it'd make you less receptive in the future to the idea that Rumsfeld's a war criminal, no matter how it's presented, because you'd associate such ideas with the behavior of these women.

[ObamAtomic]

War criminals their look is very dignified! Always!

[GonzoFactor]

Agreed. Rumsfeld's incompetence as SecDef led to innumerable lives lost on both sides, horrendously useless property destruction, and a war that could have been won in a reasonable time instead of the protracted mess that he and Paul Bremer created. But these folks are producing nothing useful. They're causing some sympathy for Rumsfeld rather than causing investigations and the incarceration that he so richly deserves.

[rsprags]

This is one of the big problems in this country; many love false perception over truth. "It looked like a distinguished older man....." Answer that you see is the big problem; their point was to let the world know that he is a war criminal. Bush went to Texas why are these guys still in D.C. ? They cannot let go of the spot light and they are trying to prevent their illegal activity from being exposed.

[dogman44]

The business suit, camouflage for the economic predator.

[Bernique]

dignified old man? I don't see that man anywhere. I see women very angry at a man who is a war criminal.

[phantom5551]

yeah, this is a great way to get people behind your cause. rumsfeld is a war criminal, but no one well ever take this approach seriously

[yaworsja]

I wonder if she "protested" Saddam Hussein and called him a "war criminal" responsible "for the deaths of millions of Iraqis."

[Fluent08]

this is child's logic. two wrongs don't make a right. the US is supposed to be 'civilized' and better than its enemies. rumsfeld, the rest of BushCo, and you are not.

[GonzoFactor]

Hard to do when he's dead.

[FrozenNorthObserver]

considering what the U S fraudulent illegal invasion has done to Ira q you couldn't of picked a worse comparision. Any other counrty that had done that would have had their leaders sitting in the Hague by now. Just like Bosnia.

[Bernique]

Code Pink was founded to protest the impending war ON Iraq. The war that was started by the previous administration, yaworsja, and has now become an insane, endless, costly, OCCUPATION.

[ObamAtomic]

you Fail!

[weatherwaxx]

I wish more Americans had the guts to yell at these war criminals.

[rsprags]

I agree!