If you haven’t died laughing over Dick Cheney’s lecture to the Obama administration about Benghazi and preventing terror attacks on Hannity last night, you may be at risk again tonight watching Donald Rumsfeld lecture Obama about the need to “gather the facts and then inform the American people.” This, from the guy who assured America that he knew where Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction were and that the Iraq war probably wouldn’t last as long as six months. And then testified that he had “never painted a rosy picture” about Iraq.
On the subject of President Obama’s characterization of the Benghazi attacks, Rumsfeld told Sean Hannity, “I can’t imagine how a person could stand up there when everyone involved knew it was a terrorist attack, it was the anniversary of 9/11. …The idea that it was somehow related to a YouTube video and that that narrative kept being promoted, I suppose it’s because it fit their hopes and what they wanted to be the case.”
Well, if there’s one thing Rumsfeld should know about, it’s using a narrative to fit political hopes. But then he had the nerve to point the finger at the Obama administration for not being truthful enough: “It was a terrible tragedy and people lost their lives and the way it’s been handled since then has compounded the problem. …The first rule of something like that is to gather the facts and then inform the American people.”
Maybe Rumsfeld thought Obama should come out with the kind of “truth” like, “You go to Libya with the State Department you have, not the one you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Because, you know, that worked so well when Rumsfeld made similar remarks about the army when they complained about lack of proper armament for their vehicles in Iraq.
Not that Hannity gave even a smidgen of indication that there was anything controversial in Rumsfeld’s national security/terror-fighting cred. Hannity said, “Tell ‘em the truth! We deserve the truth, don’t we?”
Rumsfeld replied, “In our system we have to do that. …There’s no question that the narrative that was put out after the fact – days after the fact, weeks after the fact, was false.”
At the end of the discussion, Hannity said he’s going to have a one-hour special with Rumsfeld and a “studio audience.” On Hannity, “studio audience” means a hand-picked group of like-minded guests. By then, I fully expect Rumsfeld to have morphed into a Fox News, terror-fighting superhero. Especially if he continues to criticize President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Because on Fox, talking tough and using the word "terrorist" seems to be the main requirement.
