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Originally Posted by bradclark1
Back to the chain of command thing. What if the chain of command doesn't work?
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I knew you'd say that.
I confess I don't know; maybe I have too much faith in the idea that there's always a way to work within the system....
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Should they say "Oh well I tried" and go about their business or do you go to the only avenue left and that is to go public. Nobody has been able to answer that question.
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Yeah, it's perfectly valid to ask "well, what do you do if you feel you have no other option" - I guess it's one of those "burden of command" kind of decisions that every individual has to make on his or her own. I'm not military, so it'd be disingenuous of me to say "Oh, well, I know I'd handle it such-and-such a way...."
And by that rule maybe I shouldn't criticize the generals speaking out now at all. On the other hand, what bugs me about having delicate situations handled "on camera" like this is that - and I may be waaay off base here - it's that ever since Watergate (which I'm barely old enough to include as an event in my lifetime), we as a nation seem less and less able to deal with delicate situations according to the processes of state which we claim to value. Instead, we go from scandal to scandal and from one quick and dirty solution to the next. It's always about the drama, the investigation, laying the mighty low, etc. Whether it's Watergate, Iran-Contra, Clarence Thomas, Clinton's women, Bush's drinking, the contested election, John Kerry and patrol boats, Dan Rather, Sept. 11th, Katrina... you name it. We've had so may "unusual circumstances" in my lifetime that there aren't any "usual" ones left. We just flail from episode to episode to episode.
Hope I'm making sense; I realize I'm off on a bit of a tangent to the original discussion. So to (hopefully) get back on track, part of my aversion to this thing with the generals and Rumsfeld is that it's just another episode.... It's exhausting.
P.S. Sorry you got into hot water with the wife. Had some explaining to the girlfriend to do myself....
