The New York Times did a piece yesterday on President Obama’s ongoing visits to Walter Reed hospital to see wounded veterans. It is a moving piece about a president who has made 23 visits to Walter Reed as president of the United States over his 8 years in office. Read the piece with a tissue in hand because it is a very hard thing to imagine and regardless of what you think of President Obama’s foreign policies you cannot deny that he walks the walk of owning his presidency.
“The first term, our visits would last for hours because there would be 25, 50, 75 folks that we’d be seeing, going room to room, many with devastating injuries,” Michelle Obama, who has made her own trips to Walter Reed, said recently. “And now, today, just last week he went to visit, and he was there for 30 minutes because there are fewer of our men and women who are being injured in war.”
The article notes that President Obama has been critiqued for his restraint of bankrupting our economy and sending more and more troops throughout the world. The article notes this in tandem with Obama’s visits to veterans, seeing the damage done. Of course this opens up Republican-based hawkish criticisms like this:
Eliot A. Cohen, an official in the George W. Bush administration who is now professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, said that Mr. Obama’s trips to Walter Reed may have been the reason, and that future presidents should avoid the visits.
“A president has to be psychologically prepared to send people into harm’s way and to get a good night’s sleep,” Mr. Cohen said. “And anything they do that might cripple them that way means they’re not doing their job.”
Obviously President Obama doesn’t agree with this stupid assessment. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking will be what’s used by the Trump administration and other Republicans when they sign off on sending more of our young men and women into harm’s way for whatever reasons their billionaire-braintrust decides.