Rumsfeld: "To find the truth takes weeks!"

Donald Rumsfeld equivocates, and he does it badly. We knew that. But even so, his appearance on PBS's "The Newshour" Thursday was pretty jaw-dropping. There was the classic moment when Rumsfeld, sticking to the tattered blame-the-media script of this administration, brought up the discredited Newsweek report on military interrogators flushing a Koran down the toilet, and lectured host Jim Lehrer: "To find the truth out takes weeks! To spread something that's not true takes five minutes and it's all over the globe." That certainly does seem to be the main media lesson of this war, buddy, but not quite in the way you are suggesting. There are other bafflingly heavy-handed moments. The self-comparison to Washington and Lincoln. The response that's essentiallly: 34 people died in a bus bombing in Iraq -- but the stock market's working! And his distinction between soldiers "killed" and those who have "died" is a terrible, sub-blogger spin job. But watch to the end, when he tries to look at some horrifying figures in a positive new light. Trust us, you'll have the same expression on your face that Lehrer does, below. [This is a longer file than most, and will take a little longer to load.]