Double standards
September 21st, 2007, 5:51 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
While I don’t think that Gen. Petraeus’ presentation made much of a case for staying in Iraq, I did find the “General Betray-us” label in a recent ad by the anti-war MoveOn group in bad taste (even though I agree with a lot of the substance of the ad)
So it’s no surprise that Republicans are even more outraged: A letter to the Daily News today, for instance, proclaims the ad “libelous and shameful” and a “cowardly politically motivated attack on a dedicated, lifetime combat commander” that “trashes all of our fighting men and women.” He’s not alone in this sentiment.
I can’t wait until we see similar Republican outrage over neoconservative, pro-war pundit Michael Ledeen whose Monday post on the National Review’s blog blasts recently retired Gen. John Abizaid: “It was under Abizaid that the copious evidence of Iranian activity was suppressed, and we, let’s say, took it easy on the thousands of Revolutionary Guards killers running all over the country”
Now personally, I think these claims are nonsense. But from Ledeen’s point of view, what he’s saying is that a four-star general is a liar (if he’s suppressing “copious evidence”) and possibly traitorous (if he was actually “taking it easy” on Iranian agents running wild in Iraq). Exactly the kind of outrageous attack on our fighting forces that Republicans hate. And I’m sure just as the Senate has condemned the MoveOn ad, they’ll now vote to condemn National Review and Ledeen.
Except, of course, Ledeen was attacking Abizaid for saying that America could live with a nuclear-armed Iran. So we’re far more likely to see prominent Republicans and senators cheering Ledeen than condemning him; a military or ex-military officer who dissents from the White House view is no longer to be revered and respected but condemned as a traitor and a weakling (as has happened to John Murtha, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry and others).
For some Republicans “support the troops” means “support the troops as long as they’re a politically useful tool and no longer.”
