Shep to the “Dear Mr. Obama” guy: How is it disrespectful to call the war a mistake?

Eleven million views on YouTube later, he’s finally landed in Studio B. Reminiscent of the Joe the Plumber interview from the other day insofar as Shep’s clearly cutting him extra slack for not being a professional talking head (and for being a disabled vet, of course) and just as clearly not taken with every aspect of his argument. The money quote from the “Dear Mr. Obama” clip embedded below:

When you call the Iraqi war a mistake, you disrespect the service and the sacrifice of everyone who has died promoting freedom.

What he’s really getting at here, I suspect, is the rhetorical tapdance Democratic leaders have been doing for five years in insisting simultaneously that the war was an epic miscalculation but that no soldier who’s served in it has died in vain. That’s a classic case of political convenience trumping logical coherence, which explains why both Pelosi and The One — in one of his feeblest moments on the trail — have strained so hard to try to square the circle. You can oppose the war while supporting the troops, but you can’t then claim (persuasively, at least) that those troops’ lives were well spent. Cook, I think, is extrapolating quite reasonably from The One’s anti-war rhetoric that he regards fallen soldiers as having laid down their lives for nothing. As a matter of record, Obama doesn’t believe that. As a matter of logic, draw your own conclusions.

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