The press is trying to gin up a particularly insidious scandal against President Bush, claiming that he doesn't appreciate the sacrifices of U.S. troops in Iraq because he hasn't attended any military funerals.
Media rhetoric on this subject has become particularly toxic of late.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich got the ball rolling last week when he complained to CNN that the White House knows how images of Bush attending military funerals would "speak more than 1,000 words, and they want to censor them, basically."
Not to be outdone, the Times' Maureen Dowd carped sarcastically on Sunday:
"It's understandable why, going into his reelection campaign, Mr. Bush wouldn't want to underscore that young Americans keep getting whacked over there, and we don't know who is doing it or how to stop it."
Tuesday morning, "Today Show" host Katie Couric chose to commemorate Veteran's Day by grilling Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers about the Bush administration's decision not to permit coverage of bodies arriving at Dover Air Force Base.
"The policies in effect at Dover go back to 1991 and have been consistent since then through three administrations now," Gen. Myers explained. "What it's really about is proper dignity and respect, and not making a spectacle of all returning heroes such as those that have fallen."
The pundit class' sensitivity to the issue of whether a president is attending enough military funerals is a relatively new phenomenon. Though casualty rates during the Clinton years never approached the levels now being sustained in Iraq, combat deaths weren't exactly unheard of.
They included eighteen U.S. Army Rangers killed in Somalia in 1993, nineteen U.S. airmen killed in the 1996 Khobar Towers barracks bombing, four soldiers dead in Haiti [suicides, the White House insisted] and 17 Navy men and women killed in the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.
Yet, in a comprehensive review of reports from 1993 to 2001, we couldn't find a single instance of Mr. Clinton attending any military funeral anywhere.
It's not that the ex-president was funeral-averse. In fact, his notorious "I-feel-your-pain" style earned him the moniker of "Mourner-in-Chief" in some quarters, especially after his performance at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial service in 1995.
And while we could find no record of Clinton attending funerals of the soldiers he sent into harm's way, he never seemed to miss a funeral for one of his fundraisers - attending services for big-bucks donor Larry Lawrence and even speaking at the funeral of the father of mega-fundraiser-turned-DNC chief Terry McAuliffe.
Then there was Clinton's bravura performance at the 1996 funeral of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, where cameras caught the Commander-in-Chief laughing before he noticed he was being videotaped - at which point he lapsed into-full-blown lip-biting mourning mode.
At the time, the establishment press dutifully pretended not to notice Clinton's Brown funeral antics. |
