In response to How Dare Republicans Interrupt White House Grandstanding with Inconvenient Facts:
RE that “breaking news story” from Buzzfeed: “A former Bush Administration official hired, then resigned, as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman played a key role in publicizing critics of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the released prisoner of war.”
It’s hard not to suspect that some kind of bat-signal went out from the White House to their dwindling number of willing media lap dogs.
Because, as you note – quite a few of the usual suspects are talking-up the “Republicans are politicizing an issue to hurt Obama” line in the past couple of days. And that line happens to be Obama’s favorite accusation to make against Republicans. Nothing the GOP does is ever motivated by principle – it’s always rank, petty politics, Obama likes to tell his audiences (who are apparently unable to recognize projection when they see it.)
So now, we are seeing this lamely becoming an attempted talking point by some in the media.
Even in the New York Times story I linked to earlier, the authors felt the need to disclose the irrelevant fact that the military sources they used for their story were provided by… “Republican strategists.”
The furious search for Sergeant Bergdahl, his critics say, led to the deaths of at least two soldiers and possibly six others in the area. Pentagon officials say those charges are unsubstantiated and are not supported by a review of a database of casualties in the Afghan war.
“Yes, I’m angry,” Joshua Cornelison, a former medic in Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday arranged by Republican strategists. “Everything that we did in those days was to advance the search for Bergdahl. If we were doing some mission and there was a reliable report that Bergdahl was somewhere, our orders were that we were to quit that mission and follow that report.”
Sergeant Bergdahl slipped away from his outpost, the former senior officer said, possibly on foot but more likely hiding in a contractor’s vehicle. “He didn’t walk out the gate through a checkpoint, and there was no evidence he breached the perimeter wire and left that way,” the ex-officer said.
***
Platoon members said Sergeant Bergdahl, of Hailey, Idaho, was known as bookish and filled with romantic notions that some found odd.
“He wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds,” Cody Full, another member of Sergeant Bergdahl’s platoon, said in an interview on Monday also arranged by Republican strategists. “He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there, learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto.”
The pathetic aspect of this isn’t the fact that Republicans are shopping a story that puts the Obama administration in a bad light. It’s the fact that they have to shop a story that puts the Obama administration in a bad light.
Once upon a time, didn’t the media actually go out and find stories on their own, without having to have them dropped onto their laps by Republican strategists?