It doesn’t even sound particularly controversial. A handful of members of Congress want a temporary memorial in the Capitol to honor troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. At this point, you probably couldn’t even guess which party the lawmakers requesting the memorial belong to, nor should you.
Of course, this is an election season, fallen troops are controversial, the members are Democrats, and this is Washington, so the memorial is poised to become yet another partisan fight.
“This tribute would serve as an important show of respect to these American heroes and their families,” said Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, who joined Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., in seeking the memorial.
The two lawmakers, in an August 30 letter to Hastert, R-Ill., suggested a display of placards in the Capitol Rotunda honoring those who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. They said the temporary memorial could provide pictures and biographical information of the fallen and include space for visitors to write tributes.
The political implications are significant.
A GOP leadership aide said the request was unprecedented and wondered if Democrats were attempting to score political points.
Here we go again.
Honoring fallen troops, because it was an idea from House Dems, is seen as suspicious. For Republicans, there has to be some alterior Dem motive involving “scoring political points,” because, well, there just does.
It’s just like the fight earlier this year when the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest owner of television stations, announced that it had ordered its eight ABC affiliates not to carry an episode of Nightline because it would feature all of the troops that had been killed in Iraq. For these conservatives, reading the names and showing the faces of soldiers who had made the ultimate sacrifice constituted a “political statement” that shouldn’t be broadcast.
And now Reps. Turner and Emanuel want to create a temporary memorial and the GOP is distrustful because honoring troops has suddenly become controversial in Washington.
Is this what Bush meant by his promise to “change the tone” in DC?