Confronting Rumsfeld

Some Huffington Post commenters who admire Code Pink's moxie think the mere willingness to insult Donald Rumsfeld to his face is a great accomplishment. It is not. It trivializes his alleged crimes to showily spew inane jargon, especially when nothing else is included in the presentation.

It's not as if it would be overly burdensome to inject damning evidence into a verbal ambush of Rumsfeld. That's what ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern did when he found himself in a position to upbraid the manipulative master of war.

During an audience Q&A session at a 2006 public forum in Atlanta, McGovern seized the opportunity to grill Rumsfeld about having described evidence of WMD as "bullet-proof," and about having told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "We know where they [WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west south and north somewhat."

Well-intentioned but undisciplined activists should compare McGovern's Rummy moment to Code Pink's recent stunt, and take note of which encounter more greatly damaged the target:

Jeff Norman blogs at CitizenJeff.com.

Comments

[eposter]

May Rumsfeld encounter kooks everywhere he goes in addition to the more serious.

[eden4barack08]

You're comparing apples and oranges. It's not like we'll ever get another chance to have Rummy at another official press conference.

There are a lot of methods of Code Pink I don't necessarily find useful, but this one was brave, necessary, and probably the last chance we had of shaming this war criminal who's been in hiding for years, in public. I applaud them for it!

[Timtheenchanter]

Do more of it. Confronting them needs to be done

[nursehope]

God bless both of those brave women!

[danielmcvicar]

Where was the media followup to Ray McGovern?

[HST]

danielmcvicar

exactly. That why code pink needs to keep following Rummy. The more noise they make the better.

[Jeff Norman - Huffpost Blogger]

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that McGovern's encounter got more TV coverage, and was taken more seriously. Virtually nobody who shares his position saw any down side to what he did. By contrast, the reaction to the Code Pink encounter is very mixed, even among people who share their position.

The Code Pink apologists (here and in the comments section of my previous post) have so far failed to address my point that it would be better to make a real citizen arrest and/or to specify Rumsfeld's crime(s). Nobody who expressed disagreement has explained why it's better to be more toothless and vague than to do what I'm suggesting. This failure to address the argument that's been presented exemplifies one of my points, which is that many activists care only about how they FEEL.

I'm trying to generate a civilized discussion that's based more on a cost-benefit analysis than on an announcement of feelings.