{"id":5761,"date":"2005-11-07T11:25:31","date_gmt":"2005-11-07T16:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5761"},"modified":"2005-11-07T11:25:31","modified_gmt":"2005-11-07T16:25:31","slug":"does-rumsfeld-really-want-to-go-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/does-rumsfeld-really-want-to-go-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Rumsfeld really want to go there?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever the loyalist, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to defend Bush’s plummeting national support last week by comparing his boss<\/a> to another president who suffered in the polls.<\/p>\n

“President Harry Truman,” Rumsfeld said at a press briefing, “now remembered as a fine president, would leave office in 1953 with an approval rating of about 25 percent, one of the lowest recorded ratings since folks started measuring those things.” That’s even lower than Bush’s 35 to 39 percent ratings these days.<\/p>\n

“Back then,” Rumsfeld recalled, “a great many people questioned whether young Americans should face death and injury in Korea, thousands of miles from home, for a result that seemed uncertain at best. And today the answer is the Korean peninsula.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The WaPo’s Al Kamen suggested the Bush gang isn’t thrilled<\/a> with the comparison because “a half-century is a long time for a politician to wait for vindication.”<\/p>\n

But it seems to me there’s a different reason to be uncomfortable with the association between Truman’s Korea and Bush’s Iraq. If Rumsfeld’s right, by the year 2057, the United States will still have 37,000 troops in Iraq and the country will still be among the most dangerous places on the planet.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, it seems, Rumsfeld goes with the comparisons he has, not the comparisons he wants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever the loyalist, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to defend Bush’s plummeting national support last week by comparing his boss to another president who suffered in the polls. “President Harry Truman,” Rumsfeld said at a press briefing, “now remembered as a fine president, would leave office in 1953 with an approval rating of about 25 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}