Condi Goes Too Far
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown
Monday 26 February 2007
Olbermann: Secretary Rice's comparison
of Saddam to
Hitler is not accurate.
On "Fox News Sunday" Feb. 25, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
paralleled World War II with the state of Iraq when discussing what
would happen if Congress were to revise the Iraq authorization:
We already know about her suggestion that the president could just
ignore whatever congressional Democrats do about Iraq.
Just ignore Congress.
We know how that game always turns out. Ask President Nixon. Ask
President Andrew Johnson.
Or ask Vice President Dick Cheney, who utterly contradicted Secretary
Rice on Monday when he warned President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan
about what those mean congressional Democrats could do to his foreign aid.
All of this, par for the course.
But about what the secretary said regarding the prospect of Congress'
revising or repealing the 2002 authorization of the war in Iraq:
Here we go again! From springs spent trying to link Saddam Hussein to
9/11, to summers of cynically manipulated intelligence, through autumns
of false patriotism, to winters of war, we have had more than four years
of every cheap trick and every degree of calculated cynicism from this
administration, filled with Three-Card Monte players.
But the longer Dr. Rice and these other pickpockets of a nation's
goodness have walked among us, waving flags and slandering opponents and
making true enemies - foreign and domestic - all hat and no cattle
all
the while, the overriding truth of their occupancy of our highest
offices of state has only gradually become clear.
As they asked in that Avis commercial: "Ever get the feeling some people
just stopped trying?"
Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought he could equate those who
doubted him with Nazi appeasers, without reminding anybody that the
actual, historical Nazi appeasers in this country in the 1930s were the
Republicans.
Vice President Cheney thought he could talk as if he and he alone knew
the "truth" about Iraq and 9/11, without anyone ever noticing that
even
the rest of the administration officially disagreed with him.
The president really acted as if you could scare all of the people all
of the time and not lose your soul - and your majority - as a result.
But Secretary of State Rice may have now taken the cake. On the Sunday
morning interview show "Of Broken Record" on Fox, Dr. Rice spoke
a
paragraph, which if it had been included in a remedial history paper at
the weakest high school in the nation would've gotten the writer an "F"
- maybe an expulsion.
If Congress were now to revise the Iraq authorization, she said, out
loud, with an adult present: "... it would be like saying that after
Adolf
Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change, then, the resolution that
allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with
creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."
The secretary's résumé reads that she has a master's degree
and a Ph.D
in political science. The interviewer should have demanded to see them,
on the spot. Dr. Rice spoke 42 words. She may have made more mistakes in
them than did the president in his State of the Union Address in 2003.
There is, obviously, no mistaking Saddam Hussein for a human being. But
nor is there any mistaking him for Adolf Hitler.
Invoking the German dictator who subjugated Europe; who tried to
exterminate the Jews; who sought to overtake the world is not just in
the poorest of taste, but in its hyperbole, it insults not merely the
victims of the Third Reich, but those in this country who fought it and
defeated it.
Saddam Hussein was not Adolf Hitler. And George W. Bush is not Franklin
D. Roosevelt - nor Dwight D. Eisenhower. He isn't even George H.W. Bush,
who fought in that war.
However, even through the clouds of deliberately spread fear, and even
under the weight of a thousand exaggerations of the five years past, one
can just barely make out how a battle against international terrorism in
2007 could be compared - by some - to the Second World War.
The analogy is weak, and it instantly begs the question of why those of
"The Greatest Generation" focused on Hitler and Hirohito, but our
leaders seem to have ignored their vague parallels of today to instead
concentrate on the Mussolinis of modern terrorism.
But in some, small, "You didn't fail, Junior, but you may need to go to
summer school" kind of way, you can just make out that comparison.
But, Secretary Rice, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was akin to
overthrowing Adolf Hitler? Are you kidding? Did you want to provoke the
world's laughter?
And, please, Madame Secretary, if you are going to make that most
implausible, subjective, dubious, ridiculous comparison; if you want to
be as far off the mark about the Second World War as, say, the pathetic
Holocaust-denier from Iran, Ahmadinejad - at least get the easily
verifiable facts right: the facts whose home through history lies in
your own department.
"The resolution that allowed the United States to" overthrow Hitler?
On the 11th of December, 1941, at 8 o'clock in the morning, two of
Hitler's diplomats walked up to the State Department - your office,
Secretary Rice - and 90 minutes later they were handing a declaration
of war to the chief of the department's European Division. The Japanese
had bombed Pearl Harbor four days earlier, and the Germans simply piled on.
Your predecessors, Dr. Rice, didn't spend a year making up phony
evidence and mistaking German balloon-inflating trucks for mobile germ
warfare labs. They didn't pretend the world was ending because a tin-pot
tyrant couldn't hand over the chemical weapons it turned out he'd
destroyed a decade earlier. The Germans walked up to the front door of
our State Department and said, "We're at war." It was in all the papers.
And when that war ended, more than three horrible years later, our
troops and the Russians were in Berlin. And we stayed, as an occupying
force, well into the 1950s. As an occupying force, Madam Secretary!
If you want to compare what we did to Hitler and in Germany to what we
did to Saddam and in Iraq, I'm afraid you're going to have to buy the
whole analogy. We were an occupying force in Germany, Dr. Rice, and by
your logic, we're now an occupying force in Iraq. And if that's the way
you see it, you damn well better come out and tell the American people
so. Save your breath telling it to the Iraqis - most of them already buy
that part of the comparison.
"It would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we
needed to change then, the resolution that allowed the United States to
do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in
Europe after he was overthrown."
We already have a subjectively false comparison between Hitler and
Saddam. We already have a historically false comparison between Germany
and Iraq. We already have blissful ignorance by our secretary of state
about how this country got into the war against Hitler. But then there's
this part about changing "the resolution" about Iraq; that it would
be
as ridiculous in the secretary's eyes as saying that after Hitler was
defeated, we needed to go back to Congress to "deal with creating a
stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."
Oh, good grief, Secretary Rice, that's exactly what we did do! We went
back to Congress to deal with creating a stable environment in Europe
after Hitler was overthrown! It was called the Marshall Plan.
Marshall!
Gen. George Catlett Marshall!
Secretary of state!
The job you have now!
C'mon!
Twelve billion, 400 thousand dollars to stabilize all of Europe
economically - to keep the next enemies of freedom, the Russians, out
and democracy in! And how do you suppose that happened? The president of
the United States went back to Congress and asked it for a new
authorization and for the money. And do you have any idea, Madame
Secretary, who opposed him when he did that? The Republicans!
"We've spent enough money in Europe," said Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio.
"We've spent enough of our resources," said former President Hoover.
It's time to pull out of there! As they stand up, we'll stand down!
This administration has long thought otherwise, but you can't
cherry-pick life - whether life in 2007, or life in the history page
marked 1945. You can't keep the facts that fit your prejudices and throw
out the ones that destroy your theories. And if you're going to try to
do that; if you still want to fool some people into thinking that Saddam
was Hitler, and once we gave FDR that blank check in Germany he was no
longer subject to the laws of Congress or gravity or physics, at least
stop humiliating us.
Get your facts straight. Use the Google!
You've been on Fox News Sunday, Secretary Rice. The Fox network has got
another show premiering Tuesday night. You could go on that one, too. It
might be a better fit. It's called "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?"
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