I'm just pointing out the facts.
The 8 Stupidest Arguments Being Made - Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist
[h=2]3) The motives of Bergdahl’s fellow infantry are suspect[/h] Perhaps the single biggest reason the White House spin on the Bergdahl trade didn’t hold up was because almost immediately people who knew him in Afghanistan started talking about what they knew about his disappearance. While these details had been kept under wraps via a non-disclosure agreement, the rush to paint him as a homecoming hero was too much for many of them. Whether they viewed the non-disclosure agreement as no longer operationally important, or because they hadn’t signed one to begin with, some even started appearing on national news to give their side of the story.
The first attempt to fight this was to do something very unusual — talk about a public relations firm that had helped coordinate such appearances. Now, the fact of the matter is that public relations firms coordinate pretty much everything you see on television. But usually you don’t hear about it. Did the New York Times report, when it covered birth control activist Sandra Fluke, that she was represented by the firm of
former White House communications director Anita Dunn? Of course not. How much coverage was given the fact that Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ late-term abortion filibuster was a public relations campaign? I think I saw
one blog item.
What about the
award-winning public relations campaign Planned Parenthood planned against the Komen Foundation? Not only were Planned Parenthood’s public relations firms not mentioned in stories about the campaign, the media actually was blatantly one-sided in which group it supported and which group it condemned in the contest between a breast health charity and the country’s largest abortion provider.
I could go on. But only in this case did we learn about this fact behind most major news stories. That attempt to discredit soldiers didn’t work, though, so White House aides told NBC’s Chuck Todd that they didn’t expect soldiers to “
swift boat” Bergdahl. That was a reference to what happened when John Kerry ran for president by emphasizing his military service. The only problem was that those “swift boat” veterans who served with him had a different view. Democrats believed these attacks on John Kerry were unfair. An Obama administration official tweeted out his thoughts about the matter this week:
Just … no. Speculating that the men who did not desert were “psychopaths” is just idiotic. Particularly since even if Bergdahl had problems with soldiers or leadership, that wouldn’t make him even remotely unique in the Army. What did make his situation unique was that he didn’t work through approved channels for resolving those issues without putting people in danger.
And now the New York Times is trying to make the claim that
Bergdahl’s unit was “as much to blame” for his disappearance as he was. Sigh.