Touchy indeed:

WASHINGTON --This week in his speech before the national convention of the American Legion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made an unconscionable faux pas. He defended our present policy in Iraq and our war on terror by citing historic events and quoting Winston Churchill and Georges Clemenceau. That is a rude way to discuss policy with one's Democratic opponents. The historical record is a particularly sore subject with the likes of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who inveighed against Rumsfeld's speech as "reckless." History has not been going his way for a while. Reid's equivalent in the House of Representative, the Hon. Nancy Pelosi, spoke of the Secretary's impairment...and [AD]she was not referring to his golf swing. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused Rumsfeld of questioning the critics' patriotism.

These are very touchy pols. Leader Reid went on to elaborate that the administration that Rumsfeld serves "is more interested in lashing out at its political enemies than it is in winning the war on terror and in bringing an end to the war in Iraq." But Rumsfeld never in his entire speech mentioned "political enemies." As James Taranto notes in his indispensable Best of the Web Today column, the only American politician Rumsfeld mentioned was the late Senator William Borah who upon hearing of Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland sighed: "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided." Borah was a Republican isolationist, so perhaps we can understand the aforementioned Democrats' indignation. As I say, they are exceptionally touchy.