How absurd is White House Press Secretary Tony Snow willing to push his smear of critics of the war? Far enough to say there is no distinction between troops and their mission. (via Dan Froomkin)
“[T]he troops need to understand not only do we support them, but most of the people who are on the battlefront today volunteered for service knowing what they were getting into, and knowing what the cause was.
You can’t say, ‘I support the troops, but I hate the cause,’ because that’s why they signed up. And you’ve got men and women who are risking their lives for what they consider a noble cause, which is not only defeating al Qaeda and defeating terrorists abroad, but also creating conditions that are going to allow people in that part of the world to brush aside terror as an unnecessary distraction to building a better life through free and democratic society.”
It’s almost amazing in the scope of its demagoguery, isn’t it?
Think about the implications. Every man and woman who volunteers to wear the uniform necessarily supports the mission to which they’ve been sent. As such, it’s necessarily true that if you criticize a war, you’re criticizing servicemen and women.
My hat’s off to you, Mr. Snow. You’ve taken hackery to a depth I hadn’t thought possible.