June 6, 2014 Bryan Preston Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice is pretty unhappy at you people in the media. All she did was claim that a man the military believes deserted his post and wound up in the hands of the Taliban served in the military with “honor and distinction.”
We all misunderstood her. We thought “honor” and “distinction” actually meant something. Rice got cornered by CNN’s Jim Acosta at the Normandy invasion commemoration today, and he peppered her with questions about those two words.(For you millennials who attended public schools where heroic American history is no longer taught, the
Normandy invasion is kind of a big deal. Bigger than Kanye and Kim’s wedding, even. Seriously. You should ask your teachers why they didn’t tell you about it.)Rice did her best to devalue both honor and distinction.
In a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week, Rice insisted that Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction.”“I realize there has been a lot of discussion and controversy around this,” Rice said of her remarks from Sunday. “What I was referring to is the fact that this was a young man who volunteered to serve his country in uniform at a time of war. That in itself is a very honorable thing.”“But ‘honor and distinction?’” Acosta asked.“Jim, really,” Rice replied. “This is a young man whose circumstances we are still going to learn about.”“He is, as all Americans, innocent until proven guilty,” she continued.
Let’s pause right there, to note that Rice’s boss and his associates frequently call Republicans “terrorists” when refusing to negotiate with them. Her boss and his associates then negotiated with actual terrorists.
“He is now being tried in the court of public opinion after having gone through enormously traumatic five years of captivity. His parents, the same.”
So there you have it. While Susan Rice stood on soil won by the blood and toil of allied troops 70 years ago today, she devalued everything that they did. They served with honor and distinction and bravery and selflessness, and 9,000 of them died in that invasion. They defeated the Nazis and won our freedom.What they did, and what Bowe Bergdahl did when he walked off his post, amount to the same thing in Susan Rice’s mind.Mediaite has video of the exchange at the link above.
Related: Susan Rice Defends, Rewrites Her ‘Honor and Distinction’ Statement
