Our soldiers are dying in greater numbers than ever in Afghanistan. So yes, the left sunk so low as to politicize their deaths under Bush, because they sure don't seem to care about their lives now.
SOURCE: PAJAMAS MEDIA
The last time I checked, war was still hell, and American soldiers were still risking their lives at the orders of our commander-in-chief.
But the day a Democrat became president, daily body counts suddenly went MIA, Code Pink protesters went AWOL, and D.C.’s playground politics took over the MSM’s daily propaganda bubble. As if on cue from some hunch-backed news controller for the party, gruesome stories from the front lines disappeared.
The only flurry of war coverage in the past two years occurred when General Stanley McChrystal went to the press himself, and forced his requested Afghan troop surge onto the front pages and the airwaves. Due to the general’s willingness to sacrifice his own career for our country, both the president and his media brigade had to briefly cover the war.
But lickety-split, the forced eruption of war news was once again buried in the back pages as soon as President Obama made his dutiful announcement on a temporary troop surge for Afghanistan and its companion withdrawal timetable. A tiny flurry of commentary followed the president’s decision, with the left upset that the peacemaker-in-chief was actually choosing to escalate the war LBJ-style, and some on the right saying that under the pre-announced timetable paradigm immediate withdrawal made more sense.
As soon as the press could, however, they dropped the war news like a hot potato, obviously not wanting to further alienate the president’s own base and definitely not wanting the nation to know that in the two years since
Obama took the helm, war deaths have been the worst in the whole nine years of fighting in Afghanistan. Unmanned drones are still striking targets, and unfortunately still killing civilians in the war-torn country. But one would need to sleuth websites run by military heroes to find out about all this.So much for a noble, truthful press.
During the midterm election season, the Democrat Congress’ propensity for politicizing our national security went all but unmentioned.
Harry “this war is lost” Reid (D-NV) just won re-election to the U.S. Senate, and reminding voters of his traitorous aid and comfort to our enemies in Iraq barely made a dent in his home-state support. Representative Pete Stark (D-CA), who has the disgraceful distinction of having proclaimed from the floor of our once-august people’s house that Congress was funding a war so that America’s finest “could get their heads blown off for the president’s [Bush's] amusement,” was reelected with an astonishing 71.6% of the vote.
The Democratic Party, whose own elected representatives voted overwhelmingly to authorize President Bush to go to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, shamelessly politicized our war effort from the moment Nancy and Harry took control of Congress in 2007.
The Democrats held high-profile, witch-hunt hearings in which they interrogated our military commanders as though these men were the enemy. Senators Obama and Clinton practically called General David Petraeus a liar when he was brought to the congressional carpet to testify on the progress of the Iraq-war surge. And to my recollection, not a single member of the mainstream press ever dared to ask whether this public defamation of an American military commander in a time of war would hamper the morale of those brave young people under his command, or whether it could actually embolden our enemies, prolong the war, and cost lives.When the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org ran their full-page “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times at a bargain-basement price, Senators Obama and Clinton refused to sign Congress’ condemnation letter. What signal did that send to our troops?
The words “our troops” seem to have lost their genuine meaning in the minds of Democrat politicians. Our troops are not the beasts of John Kerry’s imagination, who “terrorize women and children in the dead of night.” Our troops are not the cold-blooded murderers of the late John Murtha’s fantasies. Our troops can’t be codified as a “surge” to be bandied about as a political football.
No, our troops happen to be real, living sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Our troops are some of America’s bravest, smartest, most capable men and women. Their lives are not toys to be played with in political grandstanding maneuvers.
Whenever a Republican is the president, our mainstream press seems to “love” every one our troops with a nanny’s over-protective instincts. The wails and protests over sending our troops into harm’s way are insufferably ubiquitous whenever a Republican is at the helm.
Yet when a Democrat president sends those same noble warriors into battle, putting them at equal or even greater risk, suddenly the media nannies close themselves into the nursery closet, shutting their mouths as if on cue from above.
Yes, my fellow Americans, we are still at war. And calling this war an “overseas contingency operation” doesn’t change a thing. Yes, we still have soldiers in Iraq and they are still dying there; saying it’s over isn’t true. Yes, the war in Afghanistan still rages and real human beings are still being blown to bits there.Burying the truth only goes so far. Changing words has real credibility limits.
Because in any world, whether led by a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or a liberal, dead is still dead. War is still hell. Any party who would politicize a war is truly beneath contempt.
And any media who allows such a thing to go all but unnoticed by the public ought to hang their heads in shame.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
