Mighty Myers

"Here he comes to save the day--Mighty Myers is on the way........"

Whenever the Bush administration or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld need to deflect the critics of their "We've done so much with so little for so long, we can now do everything with nothing" defense policy, they wheel out General Richard Myers to flash his stars and defend the indefensible.

Over the last few weeks several highly-respected retired generals have been calling for the resignation of Rumsfeld (see blog "Rumsfeld Takes Flak")....so Mighty Myers was once again rolled out to lead the charge in Rummy's defense.

Mighty Myers, who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2005 was President Bush and Rumsfeld's primary military advisor since one month after 9/11. The media gives him lots of air time to make the Bush administration excu....er case.

Maybe some reminders are in order.

Mighty Myers and the Bush administration's most often used defense of Rumsfeld is...."why didn't the Generals speak up when they were serving?"

Well....one General did. Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Eric Shensiki, testified to Congress in 2004 that a minimum of 200,000 troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.

This sober, and correct, assessment caused Rumsfeld to jump up and down defending his "slimmed down" force approach..... and Shensiki's career was ended shortly thereafter when Rumsfeld named Shensiki's replacement a year early.

They used Mighty Myers to defend VP Cheney after he said on CNN's "Larry King Live" in June of 2005 about the violence in Iraq, "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Cheney made this statement even though in the previous month there were 76 U.S. military casualties in Iraq. In defense of this deadliest month total in many months Mighty Myers said on ABC's "Good Morning America" that "overall, numbers are down....Lethality, as you mentioned, is up....I think what's causing it is a realization that Iraq is marching inevitably toward democracy."

Please hum........."the truth is marching on."

Mighty Myers even swam into the Katrina FEMA-made-worse-disaster in a press conference with Rumsfeld on the Defense Department's response. He repeated Home Security Secretary Chertoff's debunked claim that newspapers on the Tuesday after the hurricane declared "New Orleans Dodged a Bullet" and, that their the Defense Department's response was developed with "those words in our minds."

What minds? Tell your response team next time to turn on the TV!

By the way, that Tuesday's New Orleans Times-Picayune carried the banner headline: "CATASTROPHIC: Storm Surge Swamps 9th Ward, St. Bernard; Lakeview Levee Breach Threatens to Inundate City."

When all is said and done, however, the Rumsfeld buck stops with Bush the Lesser.

Which means the buck doesn't stop at all, but is reduced to a dime and outsourced. But that's another story.......