OPINION:
There’s a difference, you might say, between a hero and a zero, and President Obama has blurred that difference in Washington. But the Bard was right, truth will out, and so was Abraham Lincoln, you can’t fool all the people all the time, not even at the White House. Several heroes are about to get their just rewards.
Forty-seven victims of the Fort Hood massacre of 2009 will receive long-overdue medals Friday for their service to the nation — Purple Hearts for soldiers and Defense of Freedom medals for civilians. Not all of those caught on a domestic battlefield in the war against terrorists will be there. Thirteen who were killed will be honored in memoriam, and their families will accept the honors as their surrogates.
On an unrelated earlier occasion and in a different place, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a zero hailed by President Obama as a hero, and exchanged as a prisoner of war for five top-of-the-line terrorists at Guantanamo, was finally charged as a soldier who abandoned his duty and ran out on his country.
At Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who turned on his fellow soldiers with a deadly fusillade of bullets, did not commit “workplace violence,” as the Pentagon originally called his mass murder. He attacked with the jihadi battle cry that has become so familiar across much of the world. He has admitted his crimes and has been sentenced to death for them. “Workplace violence,” indeed.
Nearly six years is a long time for the victims at Fort Hood and their families to wait for justice. In 2009 President Obama had no uncertainty about the ideological blather that he spread throughout his administration. The words “Islamic extremism” are not in his vocabulary. His administration argued that since the Fort Hood assassin was not directed by foreign terrorists, the assassin was not a terrorist and the dead and wounded were due no honors. It took an act of Congress to establish what everyone else understood, that Hasan was inspired by Islamic extremism and the victims were casualties of war.
Last month the U.S. Army finally charged Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with two violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — one count of desertion and one count of misbehavior before the enemy. Sgt. Bergdahl went missing from his post in Afghanistan and was held by the Taliban for five years before he was exchanged in 2014 for those five terrorist commanders. Doubts about the sergeant’s loyalty were brushed aside by the White House; Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser, said Sgt. Bergdahl served “with honor and distinction.” Mr. Obama invited Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents to the Rose Garden to celebrate his release.
The exchange of hostage and prisoners was curious, and the president’s celebration of the sergeant was even more curious, since he knew what his military investigators knew: Sgt. Bergdahl’s laptop computer revealed that he made contact with the enemy before he walked away from his post, a clear indication of desertion, not capture. A year was required after the exchange for the Pentagon to reject the phony Obama narrative and charge him with serious crimes which he now must face at an Army court martial.
Sgt. Bergdahl’s disappearance, like the Fort Hood massacre, occurred in 2009, the year Mr. Obama made his famous apology tour of the Middle East to tell the world that Muslim terrorism was simply a natural response to “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.” America was guilty. Events have exposed the president’s spin for what it is, the work of the blame-America-first brigade. With the medal ceremony at Fort Hood, honor will at last come to those who earned it with their blood and their lives.
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