This is turning out to be a pretty rude cock-up, all across the board. A real Gang-That-Couldn't-Shoot-Straight epic fail. A badly stage managed run out with the parents, a communications plan that didn't seem to take into account anything about the returning soldier, and a silly and poorly explained slap at Congress's authority.

And the story will have a very long shelf life. Just wait until Bergdahl's court martial starts. Because he is going to have to be court martialed, there's just no way around it.

I can't even begin to understand who planned this debacle. Who was responsible for the architecture of this morass of incompetence? If you've been talking about it for more than two years, how is it that no one spotted any of the land mines, especially since they had big shiny neon signs over them, announcing "LAND MINE!"

Just baffling. And inexcusably amatuerish. Where were the pros, guys and gals who understand that this kind of undertaking is not going to be free of challenges? Where were the talking points? What moron decided that POTUS should appear in the Rose Garden with the Bergdahls as if their son was had single handedly crushed the Taliban?

I understand that this new way of ending wars is intolerably messy and involves questions we haven't had to answer before, like "What do you do with Taliban POWs whose value to us is rapidly declining, because they'll have to be released soon anyway?" But even so, there wasn't any stagecraft involved here. The WHite House was evidentlyliving in some kind of dream world. http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/03/chuck-todd-the-white-house-expected-euphoria-over-bergdahls-release/


Via the Free Beacon. The White House’s theory, per Todd, is that “they thought that the military would rally around them” for bringing home the lone POW still held in Afghanistan. The brutal reality:


Hagel was met with silence when he told troops in a Bagram hangar: “This is a happy day. We got one of our own back.” It was unclear whether the absence of cheers and applause came from a reluctance to display emotion in front of the Pentagon chief or from any doubts among the troops about Bergdahl.

Poll the troops who were there. I’ll bet they don’t think it was so “unclear.” As for Todd’s point about the White House expecting “euphoria,” there are only two possibilities. One: Despite a Pentagon investigation in 2010 into Bergdahl’s disappearance, despite Michael Hastings’s article two years ago in Rolling Stone, despite the fact that Bergdahl apparently left a note confirming his desertion, somehow everyone in the administration who had input into this prisoner swap missed the longstanding accusations against him. They thought they were bringing home a guy who was captured heroically in combat and have now been caught completely by surprise. I don’t buy that, although I’ve had a few dozen conservative pals warn me on Twitter over the past 24 hours to never underestimate Hopenchange’s ignorance and incompetence. Point taken, and if this were purely a policy matter, I might go along. It isn’t. It’s a political landmine too and O’s usually careful to protect his own political capital. Someone surely looked into Bergdahl’s disappearance and signed off on this knowing the allegations against him.

Which brings us to the other possibility. Namely, Obama expected “euphoria” over Bergdahl’s release not because he didn’t know about the desertion claims but because he assumed that most of the public would never find out. I think he expected the media to go face-first into the tank in ignoring the desertion angle in the interest of (a) protecting the White House and (b) playing up the gauzy “POW reunited with parents” human-interest stuff. And you know what? That was a reasonable expectation. They probably thought that any desertion claims against Bergdahl would be confined to Fox and a few problematic segments on Jake Tapper’s show, all of which could be ignored and ghettoized as some new right-wing bugaboo (sorry, Jake) that no one else need take seriously. Michael Tomasky was way out in front of that yesterday morning. But then all sorts of big-media outlets dug in — the Times, WaPo, NBC, ABC, and on and on — and that made the “politicization” defense too difficult (although the left, God love ‘em, is still trying). I’m shocked by how eagerly the media went after it, frankly, although not as shocked as the White House. The X factor they didn’t anticipate, I’ll bet, is that soldiers like Cody Full would come forward and risk retaliation for putting his name to the “deserter” theory. It’s one thing to call a Republican a hack, it’s another to call a veteran who was there and who lost friends in the hunt for Bergdahl one. They’ve been left with no counter.

All of which is to say, this seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding by the White House of military culture. If soldiers had reacted the way O expected, celebrating the release of a POW, it really would have tamped down the criticism of Bergdahl. For obvious reasons: If the men who risk their lives defending America are willing to forgive him and welcome his return, who are the rest of us to question him? But that’s not how the men who served with him reacted; in fact, unless I missed it, not a single member of Bergdahl’s unit has spoken up in his defense. Obama gambled heavily that both veterans and the media would keep quiet. He lost.


The president had to be prepared to debate the substance of this decision, and he was on firm ground to do so, IMO. This would have been a fine introduction into the questions of how we're going to end our hostilities in Afghanistan. Getting our last POW (even if he's not a hero) would be a powerful message.

Making all these mud-dumb mistakes has obscured all that.