When the number of things I want to chatter about are many, and the minutes with which I have to chatter are few, I try to pick a subject that hasn't received enough attention. Tonight, we ask, "Why isn't Bush going to the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq?"
Of late, many left-wingers have been asking this question, and it is typical of the Left's off-the-rails hatred of President Bush. What they're really asking is,
"Why isn't Bush calling more attention to deaths in Iraq, which would hurt him politically and give Howard Dean some great footage to use in nasty campaign ads?"
There's a great answer to their question here, which prompted a slew of responses. Think about something else -- if the president went to a funeral, the focus of the event would no longer be on remembering the dead, paying respects to the family, and (if you're Catholic) praying for the repose of the departed. It would be about the president attending a funeral.
But for the Left, nothing is too sacred to be off-limits to politics, not even a funeral, because to the committed Leftist, politics is sacred: he does not believe in a final, divine justice to be meted out by the perfect Judge, so politics is the only way to achieve justice. Men must seize power and order the world for themselves -- or at least the correct men must do so. That this thinking must logically end in the Gulag or Dachau does not occur to today's man of the Left, any more than it did to yesterday's.
Similarly, critics complain that W. hasn't spent time with grieving families of soldiers; but it turns out that he has done that. Apparently the rule is: accuse first, ask questions later.
Well said, Eric.
After all, just look at what the Left did to the funeral of one of its idols, Paul Wellstone. Un-flippin' believable!
Senator Wellstone was one of a vanishing breed: a man of the Left who was forthright and intellectually honest about his convictions, and willing to stand up for those beliefs. He was wrong, in my view, about practically every issue that came before the U.S. Senate, but he had the personal integrity of a Santorum while voting like a Kennedy.
If there were more men like Wellstone, I still wouldn't vote for Democrats, but they would be harder to dislike. With senators like the Grand Wizard (Byrd), the former president's lovely wife Bruno, and a minority leader whose voice sounds like the villian in a made-for-TV movie about a serial killer, it's not terribly difficult to find them distasteful.
Someone described the Dean campaign's style as "the Wellstone funeral, all the time," and that's not far off the mark. I keep picturing a political operative at the funeral, one of Wellstone's protoges, screaming "WE WILL WIN" over and over into the microphone. It reminded me of David Horowitz's account of his father's wake, when one Communist Party member after another gave testimonies about the senior Horowitz's commitment to "The Cause." It was as if he had no life independent of his political views; excruciatingly, as Horowitz painfully recalls, that was indubitably the case.
I'm not a leftist, as I'm sure anyone could glean from my weblog and from my orthodox Catholic beliefs. But I do believe Bush has been callous toward the families who have lost loved ones, in that not only has he not gone to funerals, but prior to last week he had not spoken personally with any of the family members even though he had spoken with the families of slain British soldiers during his trip to Britain.
I find that in poor taste, and it seems to express his callousness toward American soldiers.
Nathan, President Bush has written a personal letter to all of the families of the deceased. What would you have him do -- travel to the hometowns of the dead and meet with the family? Or ask the families to interrupt their mourning to travel to Washington (probably at their personal expense) and meet with him? Either way, it would turn into a media event, with the Democrats inevitably saying this was for "partisan political purposes."
We should get away from phony, Cintonesque "I feel your pain" sentimentality. The president is the commander-in-chief, not the chaplain-in-chief, much less the counselor-in-chief. He has no moral duty to comfort families in person. If you think my statment represents "callousness," then perhaps you should say what personal meetings will accomplish.