The Bergdahl Chronicles: Welcome Home, Creep

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

03 June 14

ver at the intersection of Unemployable Boulevard and Legacy Hire Way, the kidz and their recess monitors are busily fashioning a yellow ribbon into a noose for Bowe Bergdahl, whom they congratulate for being home so that they can calumnize him, his family, his service, and the president who got him here.

Here comes walking bowl of froth Andrew McCarthy, who has taken a break from looking for mullahs in the icebox to call for the president's impeachment for the crime of being black and acting like a president. Andy also has a book for you to bulk-buy...er...purchase, so you know where he's headed.

The problem in this instance, however, is two-fold. First, there is the now-familiar hypocrisy point. Throughout the Bush administration, when the president relied on his constitutional authority to override congressional restrictions on his wartime surveillance authority and control over enemy combatants, the Left, including then-Senator Obama and many of the lawyers now working in his administration, screamed bloody murder. Some even suggested that he should be impeached for violating the FISA statute. President Obama, of course, is now doing the same thing he and his allies previously condemned. As I contend in Faithless Execution, he is doing it far more sweepingly and systematically than Bush, whose statutory violations occurred in the context of his incontestable war powers and were strongly supported by judicial precedents.

The last sentence is the tell. If the current president, whom McCarthy would like to impeach, is doing the same things that his predecessor did, and his predecessor's "statutory violations" -- which is a nice way of saying, "crimes" -- were exercises in "incontestable war powers" and "strongly supported" by judicial precedents, then what's the problem? Are the "war powers" less "incontestable" because it is the current president who is exercising them? Are the precedents less valid? And if McCarthy is admitting that C-Plus Augustus "violated the FISA statute" -- which is a nice way of saying, "broke the law" -- then I believe we have reached the grand finale of the ongoing conservative effort to throw the Avignon Presidency completely overboard. But that's not the point Andrew has come here to make.

As I demonstrate in Faithless Execution, high crimes and misdemeanors are not primarily statutory offenses. They are the political wrongs of high public officials-the president, in particular-in whom great public trust is reposed. When the commander-in-chief replenishes the enemy at a time when (a) the enemy is still attacking our forces and (b) the commander-in-chief has hamstrung our forces with unconscionable combat rules-of-engagement that compromise their ability to defend themselves, that is a profound dereliction of duty.

This is the same nutty theory that Ann Coulter proposed as regards to Bill Clinton when she argued, in her mendacious study of the impeachment provisions of the Constitution, that George H.W. Bush theoretically could have been impeached for raising taxes after having promised in his acceptance speech that he would not. This is an attempt to add the grounds for impeachment the same "maladministration"offenses that were specifically rejected by the boys in Philadelphia, who realized that "maladministration" could mean almost anything, that it would render the president into little more than a prime minister, and that it essentially defined the grounds for impeachment as "we have the votes in the House Of Representatives to do anything." By McCarthy's standards, FDR could have been impeached for signing the agreement at Yalta, or LBJ for calling for a bombing halt in his farewell address, and let's not even mention Iran-Contra lest Andrew evaporate entirely.

But here are The Editors being complete chickenshits.

We're glad for Bergdahl and his family that he is coming home. But it is infuriating that he apparently set this whole travesty in motion by wandering off his base after becoming disillusioned with the war. Members of the American units that expended so much effort, and reportedly lost men, in the course of looking for Bergdahl are now speaking out in outrage. Once again relying on crudely simplistic administration talking points, as is her wont, national-security adviser Susan Rice said over the weekend that Bergdahl served with honor and distinction. All indications are that he did nothing of the sort.

This, of course, is all my bollocks. The Editors don't give a rat's ass about the Bergdahl family, except as grist for an ensemble tantrum. The rest of this is slander by adverb -- "apparently," "reportedly" -- and "all indications" is cheap camouflage. In any case, all of these questions will be answered by the Army's investigation into Bergdahl's conduct, which would not have been possible unless he was back here. If we're all lucky, the investigation will give us all another look into the consequences of America's adventure in Afghanistan, for which The Editors waved the pompons from a safe distance.

Nobody cheered more loudly than the actual editor of this longtime journal of white supremacy, Rich (Sparkle Pants) Lowry, who put his own name on piece arguing that none of us should be happy that Bergdahl's no longer in a cell.

All indications are that Bergdahl, traded for five top-level Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, recklessly endangered himself and his colleagues after walking off his base on June 30, 2009. Then the military appears to have done everything it could to suppress the story of what had happened that day, while expending great effort to get him back.

"All indications" is back for another lap around the track. (All indications? Every one of the indications? Let's see what the investigation reveals.) And I'm not sure when Lowry started hating the troops the way he clearly does.

Bergdahl is a window. When the previous administration took us to war in Afghanistan, the voices of opposition were few and very far between. The previous administration then turned the war in Afghanistan into a sideshow of the war it really wanted, the war it had planned since before it took office, the criminal debacle in Iraq. The effort the previous administration put into the task of lying us into the war it wanted drained money, and energy, and attention away from the war that was (at least partly) forced upon it. The energy the previous administration put into trying to legitimize its criminal "statutory violations," as McCarthy would put it, and the energy the previous administration put into reversing centuries of American policies in areas such as torture, and the energy the previous administration put into covering it all up, drained money, and energy, and attention away from Afghanistan, which was as distant an outpost of the national administration as it was distant from the officials so hellbent on ignoring it. These were the days in which George W. Bush told us that he didn't spend much time thinking about Osama bin Laden, whose attacks on this country were used to justify the entire decade of crimes and bungling. The current president ran for the office he now holds based on the formulation that Iraq was the wrong war and Afghanistan was the right one. This was a debatable proposition, but at least it gave the war in Afghanistan a pride of place in the national mind that the Iraq-centered geopolitics of the previous administration had denied it.

Of course, even though Afghanistan had fallen out of the spotlight, Americans were still dying there. Americans were still living in a war zone, with all the physical and psychological peril that involved. There were still casualties of all sorts. Much of this damage, and many of these casualties were unique to the circumstances of that war in that place, as is the case in any war. (I remember sitting with my father and his friends, listening to them talking about World War II, and thinking how different the experiences seemed to be between the veterans of the European and Pacific theaters of what was the same war.) We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging that the experiences of the men and women who fought there in many ways were unique to the places where they fought. We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging, as a democratic self-governing people must, that we were taken to war in each different place for different reasons, with different impacts on the history of how we have governed ourselves, and how we will govern ourselves in the future. It is time for the American people to confront the war in Afghanistan not as a sideshow, and not as a theater in a fanciful "war on terror," but as a war we freely launched in a specific place at a specific time and for a specific purpose. We have ignored the unique circumstances of that war for far too long. The return of Bowe Bergdahl gives us a chance to begin that hard and serious work.