CSotD: ‘Decency’ left no forwarding address
Skip to comments
Clay Jones on the dismay conservatives are expressing over the release of Sgt.Bowe Bergdahl from five years as a POW.
Apparently, letting Qatar act as a go-between to set up a prisoner exchange is not, in their minds, as noble as breaking an international arms embargo to sell weapons to Iran and then using the money to finance a drug-trafficking terrorist group to which Congress has specifically cut off aid.
We've drifted so far past the "Have you no sense of decency?" point that it is challenging for cartoonists to exaggerate for effect. I've lost count of the number of times I've recycled this Mike Luckovich cartoon since he drew it five years ago.
But I do think criticizing the president for obtaining the release of a POW is a new low.
Granted, my memory isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good and, while I might be wrong, I don't remember a lot of people objecting when the POWs were released from Hanoi.
I'm not saying there wasn't criticism around the overall issue. For several years, we were caught up in a strange cycle where Hanoi said, "Quit bombing us and we'll let them go" and we replied "Let them go and we'll quit bombing you."
But once we stopped squabbling over who deserved to negotiate what in Paris, we quit bombing them and they let the POWs go.
There were people who felt a complete genocide, possibly with nuclear arms, would have proven some point or other, but, unless I'm remembering it wrong, even they didn't condemn Nixon for arranging the release of the POWs.
On the other hand, the recent prisoner exchange with the Taliban has apparently proven once again that Obama is a wicked bad evil man, at least in the eyes of those who feel that, while the troubles of the economy should not have been blamed on Bush for more than a week after the 2008 inauguration (and they've only gotten worse), the death of Osama bin Laden three years after he left office counts as a win on his scorecard.
Liza Donnelly mocks the hatchet job Candy Crowley pulled off on "State of the Union." (There's more to this cartoon than this opening shot, but since it's broken into pieces on the Medium site, I guess you should go read it there.)
My only misgiving on Donnelly's take is the suggestion that it is a departure from Crowley's normal approach. In fact — though GOP supporters mostly remember her for correcting Mitt Romney in the presidential debate she moderated when he insisted that Obama hadn't called the Benghazi attack "terrorism" — it doesn't take much digging to see that Crowley also has a history of pushing anti-Democratic Party viewpoints.
Which might simply mean that her interviewing technique is to attack whoever she's got on her show, which would it align her with David Gregory, who has turned "Meet the Press" into a bear pit.
For my part, I've given up on the Sunday morning talking heads because, with the exception of Fareed Zakaria, nobody ever goes beyond an exchange of talking points and of "did so!" and "did not!"
After all, a wise man once said, "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes."
But I see that Fox's response to the good news is to call Bergdahl a deserter.
Which reminds me of a kerfuffle when I had my talk show in Colorado. A state senator had objected to creating POW license plates because he didn't think, he said, we should honor people who threw down their rifles and gave up.
I rounded up a group of former POWs in the studio and we phoned the guy to ask him to elaborate, and he did one of those non-apology-apologies where he said he was sorry for saying it but, despite my pressing him several times, dodged the question of whether he still believed it.
But that was shooting fish in a barrel back in those days. The POWs got their license plates and the fool didn't even try for re-election.
Today, he'd probably be offered a show on Fox.
Come to think of it, Oliver North's involvement in Iran-Contra, in which he not only "negotiated" with terrorists but armed them and helped drug dealers to fund them, turned him into a right-wing media hero and a Fox Channel regular.
Yeah, I think we're well beyond the "Have you no sense of decency?" point.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 3
Comments are closed.