Water Carrier

CBS Evening News has become so open about its pimping for the administration that it has turned into a comedy show. A few days ago it carried a piece about Obama’s decision to arm and train “moderate rebels” in Syria, followed immediately by a description of Assad routinely and repeatedly employing chlorine gas in attacks on Syrian civilians in violation of their agreement to surrender their chemical weapons. This was an agreement, CBS pointed out, which prevented Obama from bombing Assad’s forces into the Stone Age.

No other news agency has even accepted that the chlorine gas attacks have been proven even to have occurred at all, let alone that Assad perpetrated them, but CBS does not let such trivial details as proof get in their way.

Last night they were all over the Bergdahl story, saying that the reason that the transfer was made so rapidly and without notifying Congress was not only due to Bergdahl’s declining health, which was displayed by him stuttering, cradling one arm “as if it was injured,” and that he seemed to have lost weight. The picture with which they backed this up was, to say the least, unconvincing, and none of it was visible when they showed the film of his transfer.

On the film of his transfer they cited further evidence of his ill health in that when first seen in the pickup truck he was blinking repeatedly “as if suffering from vision loss.” Or, perhaps, as if he’d just had a blindfold removed. Try again.

Further hastening the negotiations, and justifying failure to notify Congress, they claimed, was that there were “death threats.” They did not clarify that, but we now learn that the Taliban threatened to kill Bergdahl if the negotiations became public. The administration only trotted that out after almost a week of having his health issues being the sole justification for haste and still getting heat from Congress, so...

They then tried to contradict his fellow soldiers who are now calling him a deserter, because Obama would never release terrorists in exchange for a guy who was a sloppy soldier and a deserter. They claim that those soldiers were interviewed at the time Bergdahl was captured and said then that he was “always on time, dressed in proper uniform and courteous.”

If you think that any grunt would describe a fellow grunt in those terms you have not only not served in the military, you have never had a family member who served, and you have probably never even spoken to a person in the military. There is nothing there about how well he performed his duties, and I can assure you that is the only thing we gave a shit about with respect to our fellows.

I guess I cared a little bit about whether or not my sidekick was on time, at least in terms of relieving me on watch, but I could care less if his uniform was clean, and courtesy was the last thing I expected from him. What I cared about was could he check battery specs? Could he keep a motor-generator set on line? Could he wire a motor starter?

The CBS report goes on to say that they did not suspect desertion at the time and could not speculate why he left the outpost, but decided that he “was simply ‘bored’ with the routine of standing guard.” Sure, because one always wanders off unarmed into enemy territory when one is bored.