D
Darwins Friend
Guest
April 21, 2003
Of the many surreal things I've heard during Gulf War II, this exchange by Donald Rumsfeld and a reporter last week has to top the list:
DONALD RUMSFELD: The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, "my goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter) Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?
REPORTER: Do you think that the words "anarchy" and "lawlessness" are ill-chosen...
DONALD RUMSFELD: Absolutely. I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny-Penny, "the sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it. And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people e going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or ten headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot... one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country. Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.
My first reaction was: Is it possible I just heard him blow off the looting of national treasures?
My second reaction was: Henny penny! Who talks like that?
Seriously, I thought the whole thing was made up. It didn't make any sense. Apparently Rumsfeld, when he's in haste to debunk his critics, ends up talking like my grandmother.
(He's used this term before, apparently. The Betty Fnord Clinic offers this example.)
At first I thought he'd gotten the metaphor wrong. Wasn't it Chicken Little who thought the sky was falling? But I checked and Henny-Penny is, indeed, another character in that (rather tiresome) story.
http://www.kittyjoyce.com/azender/log/archive/000547.html :arabia:
Of the many surreal things I've heard during Gulf War II, this exchange by Donald Rumsfeld and a reporter last week has to top the list:
DONALD RUMSFELD: The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, "my goodness, were there that many vases?" (Laughter) Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?
REPORTER: Do you think that the words "anarchy" and "lawlessness" are ill-chosen...
DONALD RUMSFELD: Absolutely. I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny-Penny, "the sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it. And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people e going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or ten headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot... one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country. Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.
My first reaction was: Is it possible I just heard him blow off the looting of national treasures?
My second reaction was: Henny penny! Who talks like that?
Seriously, I thought the whole thing was made up. It didn't make any sense. Apparently Rumsfeld, when he's in haste to debunk his critics, ends up talking like my grandmother.
(He's used this term before, apparently. The Betty Fnord Clinic offers this example.)
At first I thought he'd gotten the metaphor wrong. Wasn't it Chicken Little who thought the sky was falling? But I checked and Henny-Penny is, indeed, another character in that (rather tiresome) story.
http://www.kittyjoyce.com/azender/log/archive/000547.html :arabia:
