The howls of outrage from every corner of the media that would erupt if a top Fox News reporter compared the heroism and sacrifice of a wounded military vet to the annoyances of a cosseted Republican politician that can’t get what he wants from congressional Democrats would be deafening. Remember, this is the same left-wing media that tried to fabricate a negative story about George Bush’s service in the National Guard to discredit him when he ran against the greatest super-soldier since Captain America, John Kerry.
But the outrage against NBC political director Mark Murray revealing himself as an utterly deranged Obama fanboy and claiming the sacrifice of Sgt. Cory Remsburg – who fought his way back from being blown to bits by a roadside bomb – was “also a story about Obama,” for whom “nothing has ever come easy,” has been muted. As Ace of Spades notes, this wasn’t just a dimwitted Tweet from the swooning Obama cultist; he expounded on the idea at NBC’s “First Read” blog. And former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau swung into back him up, claiming he had the exact same thought while reading the State of the Union speech.
Prepare to wipe the tears from your cheeks as you hear Mark Murray describe the unbearable suffering of Barack Obama, which is just like having an IED blow up in your face and drive shrapnel into your brain:
That story could also apply to Obama himself: Nothing in his seven years on the national political stage (2007-2014) has come easy. The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination. Even that general election. The health-care law. The re-election campaign. And now the president’s current situation in which he finds himself bloodied and bruised after the botched health-care rollout. Perseverance is an important quality for any president. Bill Clinton was usually able to talk his way out of sticky situations. But Obama’s M.O. is to grind it out. That, more than anything else, was the message he wanted to send last night — both he and the country are grinding it out.
Oh, my God, that poor man. Every American soldier battling the Taliban, or the al-Qaeda forces Obama lied copiously about during his re-election campaign, should thank his lucky stars that he doesn’t have it as rough as Barack Hussein Obama. Why, I think Obama might have even missed a few rounds of golf during that re-election campaign. How dare Mitt Romney put him through that! It’s a wonder Obama supporters of deep faith like Murray don’t develop stigmata to echo his Christ-like suffering.
To the extent anyone over the age of 12 feels the need to engage any part of Murray’s twaddle on an intellectual level, one could note that any bloody bruises inflicted on Obama as a result of the “botched health-care rollout” are entirely of his own making. He could have avoided a lot of trouble by doing his damn job and keeping on top of Healthcare.gov development, pulling the plug on the project when it became clear it was nowhere near ready for its October 1 launch. The gallant Sgt. Remsburg, by contrast, was doing his job.
Also, haven’t people like Murray been telling us for years that Barack Obama is one of the greatest orators who ever lived? He does little else but give speeches. But suddenly he’s a flinty-eyed, taciturn man of few words who can only grind his way through the kind of self-inflicted disaster that Bill Clinton would have talked his way out of?
After mastering our revulsion at the depths Obama cultists will sink to, many of us will feel the urge to take Mark Murray aside as though he were a very small child, and patiently explain that no, a politician’s partisan struggles have absolutely nothing in common with a soldier suffering nearly mortal injuries on the battlefield and beating the odds by fighting his way back from the shadow of death. You’d tousle little Markie’s hair when you were done and say it’s okay, you know he didn’t mean any harm, he just doesn’t understand because he’s so young, maybe wipe a little snot from his nose and tell him to be a big boy and go apologize to the soldiers he insulted.
Alternatively, I’d like to see knuckleheads like Murray and Favreau attend a gathering of wounded veterans and tell them how their sacrifice is just like what Barack Obama goes through every time he has to talk to House Speaker John Boehner.
I’m not a big fan of the outrage machine that calls for celebrities to lose their jobs after saying something offensive, but what Murray said was deeply offensive, and if NBC leaves him at his post, they’re slapping every wounded vet right across the face. Also, he’s the political director of NBC. The idea that the network can provide anything approaching balanced coverage while the Obama version of a shrieking Justin Bieber fan holds such a position is laughable. (As mentioned at the beginning, you can have a good laugh about it by imagining this was a Fox News guy blubbering over a Republican politician and imagining the reaction. Chris Matthews would already have gone nuts and trashed an MSNBC set live on the air.)
Even without the obvious partisan difficulty of Murray’s position, he clearly lacks the judgment and sense of perspective necessary to hold his job. If the guy in the AT&T commercials asked his room full of tots whether President Obama was just like a wounded soldier, they’d all answer “no!” in unison. A grown man who needs that explained to him is not fit to hold any prominent capacity in a news organization.
Not even the Obama political machine would hire him – they’d be afraid he said something else that embarrassed their boss. And there is an insult to President Obama buried in what Murray said, because whatever you think of the President, he did not explicitly compare himself to Cory Remsburg, or even imply such a comparison. Maybe he was hoping people would make the comparison, hoping that some little bit of Remsburg’s valor would rub off on him through association – this is the President who commemorated the passing of Nelson Mandela by circulating a photo of himself standing in Madela’s South African prison cell, after all – but you’d have to level the same charge at every President who ever saluted a war hero during a State of the Union address, and I think that’s pretty much all of them, for most of my lifetime.
Update: At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, this incident also illustrates how liberals view the military as a political tool, or at best look upon the troops as merely government employees, no different from the people who populate a hundred thousand cubicles across Washington.
I rather doubt Murray would ever make a comparable comparison about a Republican president who paid tribute to a war hero at the SOTU, so there’s a heavy layer of cynicism and ugly partisanship around his remarks. But a friend might defend him by saying it would simply never occur to him to make this sort of comparison about a Republican – in other words, he’s not so much cynical as blinded by ideology, to the point where he looks at Obama and sees a war hero covered with medals for his great political battles, and Purple Hearts for the injuries sustained in them, but he’ll never look at a Republican and see anything other than a politician.
An awful lot of what the Democrats have been doing lately – with some unfortunate assistance from certain Republicans – amounts to stripping the military of any special regard and treating them like any other cogs in the vast federal bureaucracy. In fact, they’re treated as less important than most of the other cogs – used as props during Shutdown Theater, first in line to take a hit during budget battles.
Generally speaking, conservatives hold the military in special reverence, acknowledging that their service is not comparable in any way to white-collar Beltway careers. I suspect the elder George Bush, who bailed out of his exploding aircraft after a bombing run against Imperial Japan, and watched his gunner fall to his death with a malfunctioning parachute, would be sickened and enraged if some reporter compared one of his political struggles as President to the suffering endured by Sgt. Remsburg. At the very least, a stern grandfatherly rebuke would be forthcoming.