Rewriting History for Rummy

Excerpts from a wonderful post that discusses how Sec. Def. Donald Rumsfeld propagandizes and then creates new realities when facts become inconvenient, histories of actual events disappear and official transcripts on Department of Defense website pages vanish.

Earlier this week, I blogged about the Bush administration's increasingly absurd efforts to spin the war in Iraq, including Don Rumsfeld's attempt to lay the blame for the White House's Iraq troubles at the feet of America's history teachers:

"I think the biggest problem we've got in the country is people don't study history anymore. People who go to school in high schools and colleges, they tend to study current events and call it history... There are just too darn few people in our country who study history enough."

Then, like a gruff professor, he rattled off some quick backup for his claim: Revolutionary War? "George Washington was almost fired." Civil War? "The Civil War was the ugliest thing -- carnage. 10,000, 15,000 people killed in a battle." What about World War II? "Same thing in World War II... Franklin Roosevelt was one of the most hated people in the country and he was President of the United States. He was Commander-in-Chief. He did a terrific job."

Only trouble is, it's completely bogus history. A brief fact check reveals that public support for WW II never slipped below 75 percent, even though more than 200,000 Americans had been killed by mid-1945. As for the public's "hatred" of FDR, the facts tell a very different story: Roosevelt's approval rating during the war never fell below 66%, and his disapproval rating never climbed above 25%.......

.......Soon after I posted about Rummy's "biggest problem" quote and linked to the DoD website, the entire interview suddenly vanished from the site. It's disappeared from the list of recent transcripts, and the page where the interview once was is now completely blank.

In Rummy's world, facts are just not to be tolerated.
Posted on The Human Stain