Chambers wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> "Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in
>> a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave
>> national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to
>> gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it  by furnishing the
>> exorbitant sums demanded.  Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem
>> never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
>>         -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
>>
>> (Possibly one of the offensive cookies)
> 
> I've got a great book on Harry S Truman.  You should see what he said 
> about MacArthur.
> 
> Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to dig it out :(  Suffice it to say, he 
> called the guy an idiot.
> 
A couple of remarks:
- According to that most reliable source of wikipedia, it was Truman 
that fired MacArthur for disagreeing with him. So I would be surprised 
if he did not try to portrait him as an idiot. That is irrespective of 
whether he was right or wrong. Simply the case that a president fires a 
famous general dictates that the president should convince the public 
that he was much better equipped than the general.
- The reason I found this quote interesting is that when you start 
reading it you expect some left wing attack on president Bush for his 
Iraq invasion. An then it isn't. Even if it had been a 50 year old quote 
from a true idiot it would still be interesting.
- He is not the only general to show insights into the political process 
after their active duty in a way that makes you wonder why they did not 
resign themselves earlier. In fact that seems to hold also for 
presidential spokesmen and the like.

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