DEMOCRATS FLEE OBAMA’S EMPTINESS OF BRAIN AND BLACKNESS OF HEART

It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, the galactic blunder that’s sent virtually every Democrat in a competitive race sprinting for the tall grass.

I’m referring to the trade of five senior Taliban commanders for, as Mad Magazine so aptly put it, "one deserting weasel."

Desertion in wartime is a capital offense. Team Obama treats it as if it were like cutting an 8:00 a.m. class to sleep in after a night of partying.

The only military crime worse than deserting your post in a combat zone is to turn your gun on your comrades. If reports from multiple sources that he collaborated with the Taliban are true, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl may have done that, too.

In the Taliban video of the handover, Sgt. Bergdahl seemed reluctant to leave his alleged captors, said Prof. David Givens, a body language expert at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Twisting a hallowed military ethic to justify the enormous price paid for this ‘deserting weasel’ heaps insult upon injury.

It was drummed into us from boot camp on that: "Marines go back for their wounded. Marines go back for their dead. We leave no one behind."

The other services have the same ethos. That’s why for months after he walked away from his post, the Army made a massive effort to find Sgt. Bergdahl.

And it’s why veterans were furious when the commander in chief didn’t lift a finger to help former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods during the seven hour siege of our consulate in Benghazi.

But when reports mounted Sgt. Bergdahl was collaborating, the Army decided it wasn’t worth risking the lives of more soldiers to get him back.

Now and then the military has sought return of a deserter. George Washington offered to trade Maj. John Andre, whose capture foiled Benedict Arnold’s plot to sell West Point to the British, for Arnold.  

But Washington planned to hang the traitor, not fete him as a hero.

Besides doing nothing for Doherty, Woods, et. al., the president has done squat to secure the release of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, imprisoned in Mexico on a trumped up charge. Does his determination to "leave no one behind" apply only to those who betray their oath and their comrades?

"Compassion" is the reason Team Obama gives for opposing a trial for Sgt. Bergdahl. Whatever the poor boy has done, he’s suffered enough.

But the soldiers he betrayed ask only that the deserter be given a dishonorable discharge. That’s so reasonable, the anger of the troops so deep, so widespread, and so well publicized their request can’t be swept under the rug. The Army brass will have to convene a court-martial.

Which is why so many Democrats are heading for the tall grass. If evidence presented at a court-martial indicates Sgt. Bergdahl did indeed collaborate (the way to bet), it won’t be just Republicans who talk about impeachment.

Team Obama has no idea how to get out of the hole they’ve dug. So they keep digging.

"We didn’t know (the soldiers in Sgt. Bergdahl’s platoon) were going to ‘swift boat’ him," a White House aide told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

Sgt. Bergdahl is a better source for what happened than they are, a State Department spokeswoman told journalists.

They all might be psychopaths, another administration official opined.

Smearing the soldiers who didn’t desert won’t work because there are so many of them (so far, 12 soldiers and family members have spoken out); they sound credible; tell compelling stories which mesh with one another and, evidently, are supported by the Intelligence Community.

To insinuate those who lost friends, husbands, sons in the search for Sgt. Bergdahl are motivated by political partisanship or racial animosity is as risible as it is repugnant.

This ugly tactic is more likely to provoke civil war among Democrats than to besmirch the credibility of Sgt. Bergdahl’s accusers.

Already hammered by anger over Obamacare and the VA scandal, Democrats in competitive races know they’ll be toast if they support an attack on the troops by a president a majority now views as incompetent at best.

To survive, they have to put distance between themselves and the president. But if they criticize the swap, they’ll be attacked by Mr. Obama’s diehard defenders.

The White House aides who think smearing the troops is a good idea reveal the emptiness of their heads as well as the blackness of their hearts.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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