137. one of my own:
You’re setting up a strawman with that last argument, but in knocking it down, you completely miss attacking my point. A thought experiment – and a bit of a strawman of my own: If this were to have been exposed during, say, the Clinton administration (conflict on or no), there would have been a similar hue and cry and questions on “how could this have happened?” But it would not have been laid at the President’s feet, and rightly so. It would have been “What the hell is the Army doing?” The Navy had an equivalent embarrassment in 1992, called “Tailhook.” Did it have people calling for the President’s (then Bush 41) head? No. It was laid at the feet of Navy leadership, where it belonged. this situation is no different.
Now, when you’re in charge and one of your subordinates has some bad news he’s hiding – the “senior man with a secret” syndrome, when it comes out, you get some blowback, too. That’s understandable. It was an embarrassment for the President and the rest of the Chain of Command and the Army itself. It was a travesty and the wounded deserve more than they got. That’s not in dispute. I wish found out sooner, they should have found out sooner. It is sad that it took the Washington Post to bring it up, that’s unacceptable. But the failure is the Army’s, not the President’s. The Army was negligent not only accepting those conditions, but for not bringing it to the attention of the chain of command to get the help their soldiers needed.
But this came out under Bush, and you, because you already don’t like him for many reasons, insist on puffing this up like a marshmallow in a microwave until it looks like yet another searing indictment of everything Bush did. But it’s still just as full of hot air as that marshmallow. And it makes you look foolish.
V/R,
Jeff Weimer
http://navy.togetherweserved.com/profile/159924
