Senate Democrats who trumpeted Bergdahl deal go silent

I want you to go over to The Weekly Standard for John McCormack’s and Mike Warren’s work on this, but here’s a taste:

“You know, I think, um, let me hold off on that,” said Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“All I’ve heard is what I’ve read in the press,” said Vermont’s senior senator Pat Leahy.

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Sen. Claire McCaskill, who crowed about the deal on the Sunday shows, is now very interested in the intel briefing she’s to receive tomorrow. That’d be the briefing she should have gotten some 32 days before she went on the Sunday shows to make grand pronouncements with no information. #YesAllWomen have to go on national news shows to laud their male party bosses’ grand accomplishments with incomplete and willfully inaccurate information, apparently.

As of now, The Reid stands alone in his continued vocal support of the Bergdahl deal.

Some on the Left have gone from cheering Bergdahl’s return as the homecoming of a hero to saying his questionable behavior at the time of his disappearance shouldn’t be at issue. Sure, I argued on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night that Bergdahl is entitled to a trial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he should go through a normal process to determine his status. Meanwhile, the men who served with him are entitled to voice their concerns (despite their non-disclosure agreements) and point to evidence for their claims.

But, as Phil Klein notes, it’s hard to argue Bergdahl’s status and actions shouldn’t matter to Americans when his status and actions as a hero were integral to the White House pitch for this deal. If Bergdahl’s not a hero, there’s far less political cover to get rid of the Taliban Five, which Allahpundit suspects was the whole point of this endeavor.

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“Regardless of circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American prisoner back,” Obama said. “Period. Full stop. We don’t condition that.” Now, it’s fair to argue that whether the prisoner exchange was a good deal or not is a separate issue from whether Bergdahl was a deserter. In other words, there’s a case for bringing him back and handling evidence of desertion under American laws and procedures rather than simply letting him rot in the custody of the Taliban.

However, the argument that the nature of his service is irrelevant to the discussion was made less convincing because the White House initially attempted to turn Bergdahl’s release into a public relations victory and presented Bergdahl to the American people as a national hero.

On the bright side, at least maybe we’ve finally found something Obama knew about before the media told him about it?

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