Too Busy With Fundraising, Brush Clearing and Napping?
“I am the one who has to hug the widows and comfort the children.”
well, not exactly….
Increasingly, this proclivity on the part of President Bush to avoid the normal duty of a commander-in-chief to honor dead soldiers is causing rising irritation among some veterans and their families who have noticed what appears to be a historically anomalous slight.
“This country has a lot of history where commanders visit wounded soldiers and commanders talked to families of deceased soldiers and commanders attend funerals. It’s just one of these understood traditions,” says Seth Pollack, an 8-year veteran who served in the First Armored Division in both the first Gulf War and the Bosnia operation. “At the company level, the division level … the general tradition is to honor the soldier, and the way you honor these soldiers is to have high-ranking officials attend the funeral. For the President not to have attended any is simply disrespectful.”
Repeated questions on the matter posed to the White House over the past week earned only a series of “We’ll call you back” and “Let me get back to you on that” comments from press officer Jimmy Orr.
This issue of Bush pissing off the military is potent. It goes all the way from the officer corp that loathes Rumsfeld’s highhanded ways to the grunts who feel jerked around and disrespected. It’s hard to say how deep this runs.
It appears to be a frustrating conundrum for Rove. This is a constituency of real importance to the GOP, but they are trying to to portray the war as going swimmingly, so they can’t acknowledge the death and carnage — and sacrifice — being inflicted on American troops. It’s quite a problem for a President whose success has depended entirely upon his Commander in Chief status.
Rove has succesfully kept the religious right from straying off the reservation (with the help of talk radio and cable news) but there is some evidence (anonymous ex-Delta force officers notwithstanding) that the military — and the large swath of American culture that identifies with it — might actually be in play. It’s something to keep our eye on.