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Rumsfeld tries to explain When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get...Refracting?By Rick Horowitz Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls -- step right up and cast your gaze upon the amazing, the magnificent, The Incredible Rumsfeld! Yes indeed, folks, here's your chance to treat yourselves to a sight you'll never forget -- right behind this curtain, the master of curt certitude himself: The Incredible Rumsfeld and his Magic Prism! You heard me right, folks -- not only do we have, right here on our stage, the colorful and captivating domo of defense, the wizard of weaponry, the master of massive military might. But he's brought along with him one of the sensational, prestidigitational devices that have helped him win his worldwide renown: the one, the only Magic Prism! That's right -- this is the very same Magic Prism you've been reading about in all the newspapers and hearing about on TV. The one all your neighbors have been talking about -- all your neighbors who read newspapers and watch TV, anyway! (Heh, heh. Just kidding, folks.) Well, in just a few moments, you'll be able to see it for yourself! Can anyone forget -- it was just the other day, in fact -- how The Incredible Rumsfeld wielded this very same Magic Prism to get himself out of a tight spot up on Capitol Hill? You folks know how tough those senators can be once they've got the scent of something in their nostrils. And take it from me, folks -- some of those senators were smelling blood! American blood! And worse than that: American politician blood! They wanted answers and they wanted them now! Those senators wanted to know about Iraq, and about how our president had made the case for war with Iraq, and about how a big part of that case was Iraq supposedly having all those weapons of mass destruction and trying to get its hands on even more of them, including nuclear weapons. You remember all that, don't you? Well, so did these senators, especially the way our president had said right there in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had been discovered trying to buy uranium from the mysterious continent of Africa, even though -- it's all coming back to you, ma'am, isn't it? -- even though our own intelligence people had pretty much told anyone who'd listen that the evidence was bogus, and this was months and months before our president ever mentioned it! You can see the problem, can't you? Of course you can! One commodious cavern right in the old credibility! After all, it's not like our president's other arguments for war -- tons of biological and chemical weapons Iraq was ready to use against us any minute now, or Saddam Hussein and those al Qaeda terrorists working hand-in-hand like some bicycle act -- it's not like those other arguments have exactly checked out either. Not yet, anyway. So maybe some of those bloodhounds on Capitol Hill were wondering, considering everything, if the president and his people didn't have nearly as much reason for going to war as they'd said they did. I can see some of you folks nodding -- you know how tough it can be when somebody's really zeroed in on you, don't you? Well, that's exactly the situation The Incredible Rumsfeld was facing -- only the cameras were rolling, too! You can just imagine the pressure he was under. A lesser man would have wilted. But not The Incredible Rumsfeld! He simply said to those senators, "The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11th." You tell me, folks -- is that the way it sounded before the war started? Or was everyone from the president on down insisting they'd finally gotten the goods on this Saddam fella? But there's no standing up to that Magic Prism, ladies and gents -- not the way The Incredible Rumsfeld used it on those poor senators. Not only does the Magic Prism bend light in strange and wondrous directions, but it bends language, too -- and it even lets history rewrite itself! So step right up! Step right up! See the magic, and see the man who makes it happen! They don't call him Incredible for nothing. Posted 7/10/03. It's
a circus out there! Rick helps you make sense of it all.
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Rick Horowitz
