Fox News’ POW slur: How loopy GOP grandstanding is Obama’s secret Bergdahl weapon

As O’Reilly tars the POW’s father while senators diagnose him via video, the right turns a debate into a circus

JOAN WALSH

You’d think the Republicans diagnosing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as healthy enough to have endured another 30 days in captivity, merely by seeing him in video footage, would remember that the last time they tried to play doctor via video, it didn’t work out so well.

It was nine years ago that Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, among others, looked at video of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo and decided that contrary to her doctors’ diagnosis, she was not in a “persistent vegetative state,” and thus President Bush and Congress should block her husband’s decision to remove her feeding tube. Bush and his GOP allies tried and failed to do so. The Schiavo backlash was the beginning of tough political times for Bush and the GOP, which lost its congressional majority the next year over concerns that Bush had bungled the Iraq War and the Hurricane Katrina response while Republicans had become the party of the bedroom police. Their loopy Schiavo grandstanding was the first sign of a party out of control.

Now Republicans (and a few wobbly Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin) are insisting that video footage of Bergdahl, taken last December as well as at his release last weekend, show that he was healthy enough for the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice before swapping five Taliban fighters for the captured soldier. “He didn’t look good,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss acknowledged, but then he added: “But that’s not enough to tell me he’s in imminent danger from a health standpoint.” Conservative pundits have made the same point on Twitter and elsewhere.

President Obama knows the GOP’s sad history of playing doctor, too. That’s why the defiant president swatted away a question about the backlash to his Berghdahl deal at his Brussels press conference Thursday. “We had a prisoner of war whose health had deteriorated and we were deeply concerned about it and we saw an opportunity and we seized it, and we make no apologies about that,” Obama told reporters.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/06/05/fox_news_pow_slur_how_loopy_gop_grandstanding_is_obama%E2%80%99s_secret_bergdahl_weapon/