NY Times' Friedman: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld think you're stupid

RAW STORY
Published: Saturday November 4, 2006

"George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid," writes Tom Friedman, in an editorial that appeared in Friday's edition of The New York Times.

"They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry -- a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Bush and Cheney, never ran away from combat service -- and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election."

Friedman's op-ed comes amid fallout from Sen. Kerry's "botched joke" at a political rally last Monday in which he was attempting to tie poor education to the President getting the nation mired in war. The Bush administration has intently implied that Kerry was insulting the military itself. Kerry later apologized to troops, but did not back down from his criticism of the White House, as RAW STORY has reported .

Friedman continues, "They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Kerry's mangled gibe at the president."

He adds, "The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories ... all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we've been making it up -- and paying the price -- ever since."

Further excerpts from the subscription-only article follow...

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What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men -- to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them?

And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you've got -- get over it.

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Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

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