Editor&Publisher: The Rumsfeld Kiss of Death
By E&P Staff
Published: November 17, 2006
NEW YORK - At least he’s consistent. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has been criticized by the press for his overly optimistic or downright misleading appraisals of our progress in Iraq, did it again Wednesday night -- on a quite different subject. In remarks at the annual dinner for the American Spectator, Rumsfeld hailed a long ago Spectator piece by economist Milton Friedman calling for an all-volunteer Army -- then added, Friedman is “still going strong.”
Friedman passed away the next day at the age of 90.
As it happens, Friedman was against the Iraq war. "What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq," he told the Wall Street Journal this past July, adding that he was "opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.”
Earlier, in the opening of his remarks, Rumsfeld had told a joke that, intentionally or not, likened the military and /or Iraq to a certain barnyard animal. Endorsing the view that “we broke some china” at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld said: “People don't like to change, and big institutions particularly don't.” He said this “recalls to mind that wonderful fable about the man and the boy and the donkey.”
The joke, as Rumsfeld told it, is basically this: The old man tells the boy he can ride the donkey but people they pass complain that the youth is letting the old fellow walk while he rides. So they switch places, and now the bystanders say it’s awful that the man is making the boy walk. According to Rumsfeld, it ends this way: “So they both got on the donkey, they come to the bridge, the donkey can't handle it. He falls in the water and drowns. And the moral of the story is: if you try to please everybody, you're going to lose your donkey.”...
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003409653 
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