Donald Rumsfeld Chats With Al-Jazeera

October 5, 2011

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sat down for two interviews with al-Jazeera last week. The first was with veteran interviewer David Frost – yes, the “Frost/Nixon” guy. He has a weekly show on al-Jazeera these days. By all accounts, his chat with Rumsfeld went very well, which makes it much less interesting than the second interview.

Round 2 pitted Rumsfeld against Abderrahim Foukara, who is al-Jazeera’s Washington bureau chief. It does not go well. Rumsfeld ends up predicting that the network will “drop all this on the cutting room floor,” but al-Jazeera posted it on YouTube instead.

“Why should I do everything you want and you won’t do a thing I want?”

“Because I’m the interviewer!”

Al-Jazeera has truly mastered the ways of Western media.

As it happens, I exchanged emails with al-Jazeera once myself. They wrote to ask a few questions about a story I had written. They were extremely polite and pleasant. Of course, I’m not Donald Rumsfeld. With one exception, no one is.

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Written By John Hayward

John Hayward began his blogging career as a guest writer at Hot Air under the pen name "Doctor Zero," producing a collection of essays entitled Doctor Zero: Year One. He is a great admirer of free-market thinkers such as Arthur Laffer, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. He writes both political and cultural commentary, including book and movie reviews. An avid fan of horror and fantasy fiction, he has produced an e-book collection of short horror stories entitled Persistent Dread. John is a former staff writer for Human Events. He is a regular guest on the Rusty Humphries radio show, and has appeared on numerous other local and national radio programs, including G. Gordon Liddy, BattleLine, and Dennis Miller.

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