Today on Dennis Millers radio show he interviewed Donald Rumsfeld. A lot of people are interviewing him because his book just came out and he is making the rounds of radio and television. The interestiing thing is that Dennis Miller played a short clip of then president Bill Clinton talking about the weapons inspection regime that Sadaam Hussein was thwarting, and that all he had to do was let the weapon inspectors do their jobs. Rumsfeld also mentioned the daily attacks on American aircraft patroling the no fly zone over northern Iraq. Just some things lost in the short period between then and now. Here is an article of even less distance in time that shows how memories are even shorter.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/goodbye-to-all-that-2004-2007/
"In times to come, the period between the failed campaign of John Kerry and the Democratic control of the Congress, coupled with the beginning of the successful surge, should be known as “The Insane Years.” This was the era in which Guantanamo was a gulag, renditions were the stuff of Hollywood movies, and Bush and Cheney were deemed veritable war criminals. Was it all a dream, those nightmare years of 2004-7?
I recall all that only because Oprah was just quoted as calling for more civility to be shown President Obama (“even if you’re not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect”
, echoing the president’s own post-Tucson insistence on a new amity between opponents. Bill Maher recently expressed outrage over the uncivil tone shown Barack Obama in Bill O’Reilly’s Super-Bowl Day interview. I think such concern for deference and conciliation is altogether fine and good; but, again, do we recall the crazy years of not so long ago?"
This was the period in which Michael Moore called for U.S. defeat in Iraq and dubbed the Islamists who were killing our own soldiers “Minutemen.”
Oprah and Bill Maher, of course, were quiet when Nicholson Baker wrote the novel Checkpoint in 2004, imagining the death of George Bush — a topic that was the theme of a docudrama by Gabriel Range that earned him a first prize at the Toronto Film Festival. Wait. In fact, Bill Maher did say something a little more outrageous than Bill O’Reilly’s apparent rudeness (“very disrespectful” shown President Obama. In early 2007, he said of an apparent assassination attempt against Vice President Cheney: “But I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow. … I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/goodbye-to-all-that-2004-2007/
"In times to come, the period between the failed campaign of John Kerry and the Democratic control of the Congress, coupled with the beginning of the successful surge, should be known as “The Insane Years.” This was the era in which Guantanamo was a gulag, renditions were the stuff of Hollywood movies, and Bush and Cheney were deemed veritable war criminals. Was it all a dream, those nightmare years of 2004-7?
I recall all that only because Oprah was just quoted as calling for more civility to be shown President Obama (“even if you’re not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect”
, echoing the president’s own post-Tucson insistence on a new amity between opponents. Bill Maher recently expressed outrage over the uncivil tone shown Barack Obama in Bill O’Reilly’s Super-Bowl Day interview. I think such concern for deference and conciliation is altogether fine and good; but, again, do we recall the crazy years of not so long ago?"This was the period in which Michael Moore called for U.S. defeat in Iraq and dubbed the Islamists who were killing our own soldiers “Minutemen.”
Oprah and Bill Maher, of course, were quiet when Nicholson Baker wrote the novel Checkpoint in 2004, imagining the death of George Bush — a topic that was the theme of a docudrama by Gabriel Range that earned him a first prize at the Toronto Film Festival. Wait. In fact, Bill Maher did say something a little more outrageous than Bill O’Reilly’s apparent rudeness (“very disrespectful”
shown President Obama. In early 2007, he said of an apparent assassination attempt against Vice President Cheney: “But I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow. … I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”
