The national outrage over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comment last week comparing war protesters with Nazi appeasers of the 1930's satisfies me like a slice of pizza after a tough day of shoveling the driveway. Over the weekend, Frank Rich of the New York Times echoed my thoughts exactly by sizing up this old fool as follows:

Last week the man who gave us "stuff happens" and "you go to war with the Army you have" outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who "ridiculed or ignored" the rise of the Nazis in the 1930's and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a "moral or intellectual confusion" and fail to recognize the "new type of fascism" represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of "Defeatocrats" but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.

What made Mr. Rumsfeld's speech noteworthy wasn't its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That's old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld's performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America's fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here's how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler's appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain's hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn't go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld's trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator's use of torture - "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" - on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld's Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University's National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is "a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last." He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary's own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

It's good to read this in the New York Times, one of the papers that sold us the war in Iraq back in 2003 by highlighting Saddam's alleged WMD stockpile. (Look here for more on the Times' role in selling us the war). But I would bet that few Americans actually know that Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam back in 1983. If celebrity babies make the front page and stale who-done-it's still make the headlines, why can't the wonderful picture of a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein make the front pages these days? For God's sake, it should be on a billboard in every city in the country.

More recently, according to the New York Daily News, Secretary of State Rice

compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine. "I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?''' Rice said.

Can you believe this? Comparing the public's desire to leave Iraq with support for slavery? Is anyone vetting what adminstration officials are saying?

In the hall of fame of chutzpah, this kind of hypocrisy would get a bronze plaque alongside the fitness instructor who eats at McDonald's. But this country suffers from national amnesia, where big news is forgotten a few weeks later and entire blocks of memory go out the window after a few years. The newspapers print new material every day and I guess the editors think that's what the public wants, not news analysis or historical context. Few stories have staying power, and I would bet that a certain percentage of the American public cannot recall who was president during 9/11.

But is it amnesia if no one knew about it in the first place? How many people know that the U.S. had a close relationship with Saddam Hussein during the 1980's, even after he used chemical weapons on his own people? The national obsession during that decade was Iran, not Iraq. Most of us did not know that Saddam was a brutal thug because the media was not ramming it down our throats. Saddam was our friend, back then. No one paid attention when some diplomat by the name of Donald Rumsfeld had a fireside chat with Saddam in 1983 and told him how much the U.S. loved him.