Angry Conservatives Forgot Their Old Angry Tweets Supporting P.O.W.
Conservatives want you to know they're simply telling an inconvenient truth about the bad behavior of U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl and the Obama administration's effort to get him back from Taliban captivity. It's also a truth that's 180 degrees from the truth they tweeted lo, these many years ago!
As we've written before, the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance, and the sacrifices of the soldiers tasked with finding him, raise many fair questions about his moral and legal responsibilities and whether he shirked them.
But rather than soberly let the military question-answering process run its course, conservatives who hate Obama as much as they love 'Murka have tried to turn the Bergdahl rescue into a political shitfest, with POTUS as the sun in this poo-centric universe. Bergdahl is an Islamist sympathizer with blood on his hands who should be executed for treason! they argue. And Obama should be impeached for his role in the whole affair.
Man, those conservatives really should have deleted their old tweets. As blogger and radio producer Matt Binder discovered, there are a whole lot of White House-hatin' hypocrites:
All credit for this trove of doublethinkin' cheerleading stupidity, this political horse-handicapping that has zilch to do with American values or POWs or fallen soldiers, is due to Binder, who makes a sort of profession out of finding hypocrites like these—hypocrites who would sooner score imaginary points in a Manichean kulturkampf against their perceived enemies than offer a coherent vision of governance and citizenship to their fellow Americans.
Oh, sure, some conservatives will bellyache that now they have information on Bergdahl's supposed betrayal they didn't have before, which is bullshit, since the trade's been publicly in the works for years, Mike Hastings wrote a fairly straightforward story of Bergdahl's disappearance in 2012, and there were grumblings long before his rescue.
And the truth is we still don't know the nature of Bergdahl's offense and captivity—whether he merely intended to go UA or AWOL for a bit (still criminal in the military), whether he was totally mentally with it, whether he was subjected to "harsh interrogation" (to use the right's parlance), whether he gave the Taliban any useful information, or whether his health was so bad that the chances of recovering him later were remote.
Mourning the men in uniform whose patterns of life were fatally disrupted by Bergdahl's disappearance is a fair and important thing. So is demanding he account for his actions. But stringing him up without an airing of all the facts; using some facts selectively to orchestrate a hacky political hit job on a hated politician; and straight up throwing one's own convictions down the social media memory hole to do it? That's truly unpardonable.