Richard Cohen: When It Comes To The Troops' "Wasted" Lives, Only Dems Are Political
March 20, 2007 -- 9:13 AM EST // // Post a Comment
Let's walk through this very slowly. Some time ago, both John McCain and Barack Obama referred to lost lives in Iraq as "wasted." When Obama did this, Republicans attacked him. Then, when McCain did it, Democrats attacked him. Nothing complicated there, right?
In Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's retelling of these episodes, however, only the Democrats tried to politicize this. From his column today:
McCain used the "W" word when he announced on the David Letterman show that he would run for president. "Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," he said. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives." Precisely so.The Democratic National Committee, ever poised for the cheap shot, accused McCain of "insulting our brave troops" and demanded an apology. Others joined in, and McCain obliged, saying he should have used the word "sacrificed." Among the sacrifices being made, of course, is McCain's integrity.
Earlier, Obama had also been caught uttering the truth. Soon after he announced for the presidency, the senator concluded a criticism of the war with the "W" word -- "over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." Obama quickly apologized, confessing to a "slip of the tongue." He then reformulated his statement using the word "sacrifices." For some reason, the Democratic National Committee held its tongue.
In other words, those Dems were low enough to exploit the troops with this partisan, political "cheap shot." But the GOP committed the very same "cheap shot," even though Cohen didn't tell you this. From Fox News, on February 12, 2007 (via Nexis):
STEVE BROWN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Use of the words wasted about America's Iraq war dead prompted a campaign strategist from the Republican National Committee to say, quote, "the families of these fallen heroes should be outraged and deserve better than to have someone describe the lives of their lost loved ones as wasted."
That's not all. Obama's "wasted" comment is featured in a Republican National Committee memo about Obama as proof that he is "an inexperienced, insulated, arrogant, unabashed liberal." As shots go, that's pretty cheap, too.
Yep, so very clearly, Cohen deep-sixed this info. He committed a ritual Snuffing of an Unmanageable Fact, an act we'll henceforth describe with the acronym SNUF -- as in, Cohen pulled a SNUF.
What makes Cohen's omission all the more puzzling is that the rest of the column is pretty unobjectionable, even decent. It's devoted to a discussion mostly of the various things Republicans are doing to use the troops as political props -- things which, unlike the skirmish over the word "wasted," have actual consequences for them, such as, you know, leaving them in a war. It's almost as if Cohen felt the need to toss in his whopping distortion of the "wasted" battle in order to achieve "balance" -- as in, don't worry, Democrats are bad, too! If so, Cohen's quest for "balance" led him to do to a pretty glaring disservice to the truth.
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