Discussion for article #223440
I am surprised the Republicans haven’t insisted that the soldier be water boarded to extract all information about his capture and imprisonment. If he had sent emails lamenting that his fellow soldiers weren’t ruthless enough, would he be a RightWing darling now?
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Exactly. And yeah, I’ve been waiting for Graham to get up off his fainting couch and say Bergdahl should be yanked out of “that cushy hospital” and sent to Gitmo for some good old-fashioned “de-briefing.”
One more thing: Graham’s statement that those five were “the Taliban Dream Team” is yet another statement without any facts to back it up. These guys are “the worst of the worst”, as Grampy Insane described them? Okay, then: Tell us who they were and what they did, so we can all be outraged. Otherwise, shut your fucking pie hole, because this was the same kind of prisoner exchange the Israelis do every day with the Palestinians. “Dealing with terrorists” is selling arms for hostages, and where have we heard that before?
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And Reagan never negotiated with the Ayatollah?
I can certainly understand members of Bergdhal’s platoon having negative feelings toward a guy who vanished one night. What I can’t understand is media exploiting those other soldiers and their valid feelings, years after the fact, to advance some unstated political agenda of the moment without any real regard for those soldiers.
Mrs. Clinton has to understand, from today’s poisonous environment, that what Bill faced will pale compared to what the forces of darkness plan for her.
Hillary made a nice distinction between “your own citizens and particularly those in uniform” and the conservative chicken hawks, prisoners of their own ideology.
Prisoner swap or rescue? Both terms have been used to describe the release of Bergdahl.
“The idea that you really care for your own citizens and particularly those in uniform, I think is a very noble one.”
What an oddly phrased statement.
I really can’t believe the lengths Republicans are going to in trying to come up with something that may stick to the wall. Who isn’t for freeing a POW? Now the GOP is calling them collaborators?
The RNC might as well hand Hillary the key to the Oval Office. They are making this way too easy for her.
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The accusation is that Bergdahl “deserted,” but since there are really no facts in evidence other than his own suggestive writings, it seems as if the logic being applied is to treat him as if he has already been convicted, and thus, that his rescue is not worth the candle. So, okay, the guy was not a model soldier. Is that the standard we now apply to assessing whether we protect soldiers demonstrably in harm’s way? I don’t think the penalty for desertion is a lifetime as a hostage and early death. The resentment of soldiers over the idiocy of various other soldiers, sometimes superior, sometimes junior, is as old as military service itself, not blameworthy, but certainly not determinative in any sense. Pickett never forgave Robert E. Lee for, in his estimation, ordering the slaughter of his unit.
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So now Democrats are on defense for securing a prisoner exchange?
This is the same thing that Israel, heroes to the GOP because they openly stomp a minority and kill Arabs, does on a fairly regular basis, right?
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Clinton did not explicitly say whether she would have gone through with the prisoner swap, according to CNN. She downplayed the controversy surrounding the deal, however, by pointing out that American allies, including Israel, had previously conducted similar exchanges.
American exceptionalism, to paraphrase Obama, come from being different from other Countries Mrs. Clinton. Other Countries sometimes do very atrocious things, that doesn’t mean we should follow suit.
Not a surprise that the Republicans are so eager to score political points they are crushing a young man’s reputation and destroying his family with who knows what disgusting, stupid, childish lies.
I have been ungodly rude to every Republican I’ve encountered today. Fucking bunch of pissant jerks.
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That’s an interesting perspective. The military is after all an institution with all the same jealousies, blind ambition, gossip and internal turmoil. Someone can and always is blamed for everything that goes wrong to advance someone else.
However, most voters don’t care how we get out of Afghanistan as long as we do…and that we don’t leave any loose ends that could draw us back in. The Neocons just can’t seem to accept this fact or that it’s all over for them in the Middle East. Bush was two for two and not in a courageous, winning way that the RNC loves to project about the leaders in their party.
Bush is Johnson now… times two. And it’s the Democrats that got Bin Lauden and are ending two major military mistakes by the Republicans.
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The nation finally got tired of McCarthy when he went after the Army.
Doing this, the GOP should expect to be sentenced to permanent political death. It is beyond the pale that they are playing with this guy’s life; who signed up to do something not one Republican of today has the balls to do. Bunch of scummy shitheel bastards. I’d like to see them put their fat candy asses on the line.
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GOTP loves the military (or more specifically the dollar signs attached to it), not the actual soldiers.
Never have.
This will change nothing.
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It’s Terri Schiavao, the Swiftboating of the Newtown parents and now this. I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot more examples of how political conservatives deal with tragedy these days. You just can’t keep up with their unrelenting rampage against common decency.
I just don’t know how anyone can be so disgusting to people who have gone through such *ell already. They have no mercy or real religion.
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When you are Left Behind, I’ll take your permission to ignore your agony. It starts with Clinton’s victory in 2016.
There is nothing exceptional much less American about being stupid. Why do you persist in defending Bush/Cheney’s stupidity? How can you suggest with a straight face that POWs are not swapped everyday, especially at the end of a war? It’s been that way since the beginning of human conflict.
Trying to smooth over your massive military mistakes by attacking a noncom who snapped in a war zone isn’t going to make the larger truth that Bush should never have started either of these invasions. He should have allowed our Special Opps to get Bin Lauden at Tora Bora instead of privatizing the job to the Taliban who have been sticking it to us ever since.
The more you protest a POW swap and denigrade the character of a man who has been tortured and imprisoned for five long years the more you indict yourself among voters as being irresponsible, heartless incompetents who can’t handle the truth.
Don’t call any POW a collaborator unless you want to be buried in the polling places come November. It’s the Republican Party that has proven it’s not fit to serve.
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Miss Lindsey McCain and MR Rogers want to send him back or they would have just left him there. And if the President violated the law do they have the balls to impeach him. I dare these Repuk cowards to try it if not shut up
I served in Vietnam and there were plenty of bad soldiers, believe me. The guys that were drafted didn’t want to be there. There was plenty of trash talk and insubordination. Guys got stoned and wandered off. Shit happens. I am appalled at these guys mouthing off and suspect they are getting paid for their stories. They better be clean as a whistle. If Bergdahl really went AWOL he will be court martialed. Let’s not forget that George W. Bush also went AWOL, and gosh, he was appointed President.
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