Susan Rice Strikes Again

By Rich Lowry 

The Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap is one of the shortest lived public relations triumphs in recent memory. The glow lasted about a day, if that, and now the Obama administration is left to whine about what went wrong. 

White House staffers told NBC’s Chuck Todd that they were taken aback at the swift-boating of Bergdahl by his former comrades. Rightly understood, swift-boating shouldn’t be a pejorative — it’s what happens when men in uniform feel betrayed by a comrade and tell the public what they believe to be the truth about his service. But for Democrats and the media, swift-boating is about the most heinous thing that can happen to someone. 

Bowe Bergdahl thus joins John Kerry as a victim of a partisan smear campaign — except, unlike Kerry, Bergdahl doesn’t have any prestigious medals to throw away (or pretend to throw away) at an anti-war protest. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, tweeted, “Really sad to watch Obama haters attack this kid who CHOSE to fight to protect the rest of us, just to score political points.” 

On CNN, Van Jones said “the air waves are being filled mysteriously with former solders just trashing the guy.” Ah, but it’s not so mysterious, after all. “It turns out,” Jones intoned, “that there are Republican operatives who are working behind the scenes to get some of those guys on television. This is an orchestrated smear campaign.” 

He was referring to former Republican official Ric Grenell putting a few of the troops together with journalists. Evidently, these guys should have waited until Robert Gibbs offered to hook them up, and otherwise kept to themselves their silly stories about what they went through in Afghanistan after Bergdahl’s disappearance. 

Joan Walsh of Salon says the critiques of the deal play “into six years of scurrilous insinuation that Obama is a secret Muslim.” I’m waiting for the piece arguing that the criticisms of the Bergdahl deal are a function of white privilege, or patriarchal attitudes. #YesAllTalib. 

About half a dozen of Bergdahl’s former comrades have said he deliberately walked off his base in 2009 after becoming disillusioned with the war and that soldiers were killed looking for him. Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard reports that the military investigated and considered Bergdahl absent without leave. 

Let’s stipulate that — given the fog of war — these accounts might exaggerate the harm done by Bergdahl’s disappearance. But there is no doubt that they are sincere and heartfelt. And what are the odds that Bergdahl happened to get assigned to a platoon full of highly politicized soldiers who waited years for the opportunity to use the circumstances of his capture as a cudgel against President Obama?