March 26, 2004
Things we don't know about Bush
Mickey Kaus:
P.P.S.: The soldier sitting closest to me clearly liked Bush, perhaps because he had just seen the president, in person, for the third time. Apparently, Bush pays regular visits to wounded soldiers at Walter Reed. Did you know that? I didn't. Admittedly, it's easier to visit the wounded than to go to funerals, which Bush has been accused of not doing enough of. Still ...
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I knew that. They're always showing the pictures on C-Span.
Posted by: Dawn Summers at March 26, 2004 10:54 AMI think it takes a huge amount of courage to regularly visit wounded soldiers, especially since the soldiers’ families are usually there.
Neither Clinton ever did visit wounded soldiers.
Posted by: Jake at March 26, 2004 11:41 AMI think it takes more courage to honor the war dead as presidents have since the dawn of the Republic. However it is good that the President is visitng the war wounded.
The story about Clinton not visitng the wounded is not true. He visited a VA hospital in West Virginia on Vets Day in November 1993 which contianed a number of wounded vets from Somalia. While I have no use for the Clintons, let's not defend Bush's continued lack of funeral attendence by embracing falsehoods about the Clinotn record.
Posted by: Von Bek at March 26, 2004 11:52 AMVon Bek:
Presidents go to memorial services for war dead. But no president has gone to a funeral for an ordinary soldier.
The reason is that other families with war dead would be angry that the president was not there.
Clinton went to see the wounded as a part of a Vets Day ceremony otherwise he never went near the wounded.
Posted by: Jake at March 26, 2004 02:55 PMAgain, Jake, I must correct your view on our history.
Just as your claim that the Clintons did not visit the war wounded was mistaken, so is your claim that no president ever attended the funeral of a soldier. I said it takes more courage to honor the war dead, not go to a funeral. That can take many forms from ceremonies at graveyards to actual funerals.
But ff the top of my head, I can tell you that Lincoln attended some, including that of Elmer Ellsworth; LBJ went to at least two (one was that of a son of a Washington journalist). In peacetime, John Tyler went to some funerals involving sailors killed on the USS Princeton (or are we going to quibble that those were Navy men and not sailors?).
And of course at the funeral of the ultimate ordinary solider-the Unknown Soldier of WWI- CJOTUS William Howard Taft, ex President Woodrow Wilson, President Warren G. Harding, VP and soon to be POTUS Calvin Coolidge and Sec. of Commerce and future POTUS Herbert Hoover were all in attendence.
Partisanship should be left out of our nation's past.
Posted by: Von Bek at March 26, 2004 03:41 PM
