His PR staff should have advised against making the big fanfare over "major combat operations have ended" statement, because, to the normal person, it sounded like, "major combat operations have ended"...Rumsfeld and Cheney dismissively refering to "dead enders" didn't help either - it gave the impression that the war was wrapped up.
I didn't think so at the time, but I figured at least another year - now that we're into the fourth year, people justifyably feel they didn't get the whole story.
And if a satisfactory story doesn't come from the president, it's going to be supplied elsewhere - the MSM.
This was NEVER a secret.
Not here, but most people do not spend hours on the Web, particularly on this site. Most people get their news from TV. And when the admin. stages an elaborate announcement from the deck of a carrier, that's what most people are going to accept as reality. No one gets to the WH without understanding that basic fact of American life.
Seven or eight generals coming out against a SoD is news - it would have been with Reagan or Clinton or whoever. A "stay the course" or "he's doing a heckova job" type statement is not going to suffice, because people are now questioning the whole story.
Giving these liars ANY credence even by silence at ANY time does great damage to our National interests.
If the generals are traitors or liars or just partisans, the WH needs to confront this. If the WH lets it pass, and only says that "we stand by Donald Rumsfeld", this story is going to fester.
Major combat operations have ended. When was the last time we faced a tank, or more than a company of skirmishers?
Early in Clinton's first term there was a mass resignation of around 20 Flag officers in protest of Clinton's social experiments on the military...and it was not news.
The White House no more needs to confront these six self-aggrandizing weasels than Bush needs to meet with Cindy Sheehan a second time.
Rumsfeld and the White House just need to get on with the job.
Pausing to engage in silly arguments with a handful of disgruntled general officers to whom the MSM has given its megaphone is a complete waste of time and will only embolden the administration's critics.
Spend a bit of time watching what gets reported. One can find numerous examples of nationally carried speeches given by President Bush that the media then writes outright false articles and commentaries on for months.
As example, recall the statement of Iraq being an imminent threat. This was reported constantly, and it took 6 months of constant statements and arguments by the Whitehouse and various members of the staff before it came to a head and the NYT (to it's eventual credit) ended up writing a half page summary of statements made by Administration officials...which pretty definitively showed that the administration had made no such claim, and in fact, had consistantly stated the opposite of what thousands of newspaper articles and television reports had attributed to them and had refused to take correction for.
This goes on all the time.
Was it Maureen Dowd that wrote the opinion piece excoriating Bush for a statement in which she had in fact edited out the word "not" and replaced it with ellipses? For weeks nationally, columns were written echoing her claim.
How often on the television news do you see where they show the President or other senior official speaking, but don't even broadcast their speech, but rather simply report their characterization of what the official said?