The Killer Rabbit Phase

I want to say something that is spiraling off the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, but also need to make a quick comment about the issue itself. Some might assume that I have an inside track or something, because Bergdahl is from a Reformed background, and he is also from southern Idaho, and I am up in the chimney of Idaho, but I don’t really have an inside anything. It’s a big state — driving from the Canadian border down to Nevada is like driving from New York to Charleston. So this is just an observation from afar, like everybody else.

That said, it seems obvious that there are a lot of unanswered questions. The only thing I would urge is that we give the principal actor, Bowe Bergdahl, a reasonable amount of time to answer those questions. The one person’s account we do not yet have is that of Bergdahl himself, and Prov.  18:17 applies here as much as anywhere else. In fact, since feelings are running so high on the issue, it would be good for us to double down on applying it.

But with that said, let me express the central concern I have about the process thus far. And that is that the reasonable questions that have been raised will never be asked or answered. We live in a time when everything is politicized postmodern style, and that means that we can have a pretty solid expectation that absolutely everything about this will be handled by the administration in accordance with feelings, photo ops, spin, polls, stonewalling, and lies.

This is not altered by the fact that the Obama team is rapidly turning into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They are playing this politically, but there are not nearly as adept as they used to be at controlling the narrative. But the fact that the Obama team has entered what one observer has called the “killer rabbit” phase of his presidency does not mean that we know the details of what happened with Bergdahl. For that we will have to just wait and see, and part of what we are waiting to see is whether wait and see will turn up anything.

It just means that the political handling of the whole thing has been inept. If we don’t yet know that Bergdahl was a deserter or traitor, we also don’t know that he served “with distinction” as one administration spokesman put it. And we certainly don’t know that he was an asset worth exchanging for 5 hard eggs from Guantanamo. So the Bergdahl case is one thing. The Bergdahl affair is turning into quite another.