The judge shows compassion to Bowe Bergdahl.

All Bergdahl got was a dishonorable discharge, his rank reduced to private, and a forfeiture of $1,000 pay for 10 months.

"Bowe Bergdahl, Called a ‘Traitor’ by President Trump, Pleads Guilty."

The NYT reports.

He was charged with desertion, which carries a potential five-year sentence, and with misbehavior — essentially, endangering the troops who were sent to search for him — which carries a potential life sentence.

The negotiations for his release became a presidential campaign issue and an attacking point for Republican critics of President Obama’s foreign policy. Last year, as a candidate, Donald J. Trump repeatedly called the sergeant a “traitor” and called for him to be executed.

The pressure on Obama to pardon Bowe Bergdahl and put him out of reach of the President-elect who has him “a no-good traitor who should have been executed.”

Obama gave up 5 Taliban detainees to get Bergdahl back, and now Bergdahl, who faces trial for desertion and misbehavior, is pushing for a pardon.

At rallies, Mr. Trump repeatedly brought up the prisoner exchange as a bad deal. At a town hall-style meeting in August 2015, for example, he called Sergeant Bergdahl a “dirty, rotten traitor” and pantomimed shooting him. Mr. Trump also falsely claimed that Americans were killed searching for Sergeant Bergdahl and that the five Taliban ex-detainees were back on the battlefield.....

The administration transferred the Taliban detainees without obeying a statute requiring it to notify Congress 30 days before the transfers.... In addition, former soldiers came forward to describe the circumstances of his capture, accusing him of desertion. That fueled Republican complaints that sending the Taliban detainees to Qatar had been too steep a price....

The argument for a pardon seems to be that a Trump administration cannot give Bergdahl a fair trial.

"Attorneys for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Saturday they may seek a deposition from presidential contender Donald Trump..."

"... or call him as a witness at a legal proceeding, saying they fear his comments could affect their client's right to a fair trial."

What Trump said — showing a clumsy feel for the rule of law — was that Bergdahl is a "traitor, a no-good traitor, who should have been executed."

This takes me back to 1970, when the headline read: "President Nixon may have freed Charles Manson-not by an act of executive clemency, but by one of errant stupidity."

What Nixon said was "Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason." Manson's response was: "Here's a man who is accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, accusing me of being accused of eight murders."

Here's David Brinkley reporting it in the soberly black-and-white serioso tones of the past:

About those 5 teenage boys who confronted a father and daughter at gunpoint in a Brooklyn playground, and ordered the man to go so they could rape the 18-year-old woman...

Remember we talked about it here on January 11th? Two of them were turned in by their own mothers. The police were criticized for not acting sooner.

Now, the charges are all being dropped, WaPo reports:

The woman and her father had provided inconsistent and unreliable stories, said Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson. Snippets of cellphone videos suggested the sex was consensual, prosecutors said. Worst of all, the father himself had been “engaging in sexual conduct” with his own daughter when the incident began, Thompson said....

To some critics, the bizarre, lurid case and rush to judgment recalled in some respects another controversial New York City rape case. In 1989, a woman was brutally raped while jogging through Central Park.... The five teens were convicted of a slew of charges [and later] exonerated....

In the comments to the January 11th blog post, MisterBuddwing had said:

I wouldn't be the least surprised if things happened exactly the way the police said they did. In which case, let the perps rot. But perhaps we should remember the case of the Central Park jogger. Five youths - four black, one Hispanic - were arrested in that rape-assault, and leading the charge, screaming for their blood, was a real estate mogul named Donald Trump. Years later, their convictions were vacated...

Oh! Donald Trump! Fancy meeting him here. The Washington Post drags him into this too:

Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers with the title: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

There's an image of the ad, but it's not enlargeable, so I can't read past the quoted headline. Here's an image big enough to read the text. Let's be clear: Somebody attacked the Central Park jogger. People were terrorized by violence in the city back then and could not walk in Central Park after dark. Women in particular were limited in our movement through the city. Trump wrote: "How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS... Let our politicians give back our police department's power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of 'police brutality'.... We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this city."

There's a lot of resonance with themes in the current election, but there's no focus on the problem of catching the wrong people. There definitely was and is violence from which we expect our leaders to protect us. That involves finding the real perpetrators of genuine acts of violence.

In this new case, it's not a question of finding the right people but of ascertaining whether the actions in question are really a crime. Much of our focus lately — with Season 1 of "Serial" and "The Making a Murderer" and much of The Innocence Project — has been on absolutely real and serious crimes and the problem of pinning those crimes on the wrong man. It's quite another matter when you have the person you know did something, but the question is whether it's a crime, as in this Brooklyn playground rape/nonrape (and also the new season of "Serial," looking into the case of Bowe Bergdahl).

By the way, if the Brooklyn playground sex was consensual and the woman was 18 and one of the boys was 14, hasn't the woman committed second degree rape under New York criminal law? Back to the WaPo article:

[T]he teens told police they had encountered the father and daughter having sex in the park that night. The teenagers then joined in the act. “She said yeah,” a man’s voice can be heard saying on the video, according to the Times. “If you said yeah, it’s lit, like, you know what I mean,” a man then says on the video. “I could tell you a freak.” Confronted by police, the father and daughter reversed course, admitting that there was no gun. The woman admitted that she had consented to the group sex. The father and daughter also both eventually admitted to drinking alcohol and having sex with one another, according to the Times....

“I think [there] is a way, from a policy and social standpoint, to say, ‘Young men should exercise a little bit better judgment in dealing with certain things,’ but what they did didn’t rise to criminality,” attorney Ken Montgomery told the Times. “I would agree, in a sense, that we live in a country and a world where we have a lot of unhealthy ideas of what appropriate sexual relationships are.”

Incredibly sad and debased. I don't know where I would start dealing with a situation that has reached such a low place. It's easy to say the government should back off and do nothing. Maybe Trump has some ideas.

With the focus off the five boys, it shifted to the father and his daughter, who prosecutors have stressed is still a victim, even if she consented to the sex.

Why, exactly, does she get to be the victim?

How she came to have sex with her own father, unleashing a torrid and tragic series of events, is, in part, a story of the failings of the American foster-care system.....

Do the Taliban listen to "Serial" and do they like it? Yes!

Stephen Colbert interviews Sarah Koenig about the second season of "Serial," which examines the case of Bowe Bergdahl.

Trouble in "Serial" land?

The prodigious podcast is suddenly switching to every other week — apparently so they can absorb all the criticism, do more research, procure more interviews, and tweak the script in the story of Bowe Bergdahl:

“There are more paths we need to go down,” [said executive producer Julie Snyder.] “Since we started broadcasting the show, we have gotten more people willing to talk, and because of that, it has opened up more avenues of reporting.” She declined to comment on whom those interviews were with, or what additional reporting the show needed to pursue. “We have narrative developments,” she said. “I hesitate on calling them news developments.”

There's also the fact that the show is not doing as well as the last season, the one about an imprisoned man and a murder we'd never heard of. Shifting to Bergdahl is telling us about somebody we already knew and had already, perhaps, processed into a kind of oblivion. Did we really want to pull him back into our attention and, week by week, hour by hour, take some differing complicated perspectives on him?

The characters in both seasons are mysterious men. We can wonder who is this guy? But in season 1, there was the solidity of knowing a young woman really was murdered and a young man really was suffering the punishment, and the mystery was whether he's the murderer. In season 2, we know the external reality of what the man did. That part is solid. The mystery lies in why he did it and what it meant to him. He's not been punished yet (though we might decide his suffering in captivity was punishment enough, so let's leave him alone). It lies in the future, what the legal process will give him. His mental state will play some part in that determination. But we'll see that unfold in the news as his trial proceeds.

Why would we want the alternative viewings of the mind of Bergdahl as managed and manipulated by the "Serial" crowd? I think the answer should be: Because there's a fascinating, delicate art to the the "Serial" presentation. But when art is about real-life facts subject to dispute, especially about current events, there's a lot of static between you and the artist. It can make you want to turn the dial to another channel.

ADDED: Saying that about art made me think about this, a quote from David Bowie that I'd read earlier this morning on Facebook. You can see that I commented over there, linking to the comments section of an old post of mine in which my ex-husband quoted Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists." That old post, by the way, links to 2 other posts, one of which quotes me quoting myself in my own comments section — recursive enough for you? — saying something about Bob Dylan that caused an uproar back in 2005: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing...." Lots of my current husband in the comments there, 4 years before I met him, talking about Bob Dylan, saying things like: "I thought Ann's quote was very smart - nearly brilliant" and "Seriously, with her aversion to politics and her ability to tweak the self-satisfaction and dogmatism of diverse groups, don't you agree that AA just might be the '66 Dylan of this new blogging medium, albeit sober? She is clearly an inspired artist hitting her stride."

"Koenig hypnotically weaves together the accounts of a trusted journalist and her own source inside the Taliban."

"The picture that emerges is a sort of counterweight to Bergdahl’s self-spun capture story: He was found inside or near a nomad tent. Nomads informed the Taliban that a foreigner was in the area. When the Taliban arrived to check it out, they told Bergdahl that they were the police, and he immediately jumped behind their motorcycles, as if seeking protection from them. They called Bergdahl a 'ready-made loaf,' a gift that had fallen into their hands without their having to work for it. Bergdahl fought a little at first, but he was pretty easily subdued. Here we hit our first real point of departure from Bergdahl’s own story. Our first muddying of the narrative...."

"A top Army commander on Monday ordered that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops..."

"... stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, prompting a huge manhunt in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan and landing him in nearly five years of harsh Taliban captivity."

The decision by Gen. Robert B. Abrams, head of Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., means that Sergeant Bergdahl, 29, faces a possible life sentence, a far more serious penalty than had been recommended by the Army’s own investigating officer, who had testified that a jail sentence would be “inappropriate.”

"Bowe Bergdahl said he planned to cause a DUSTWUN by leaving his outpost, OP Mest, and running—or at least walking—to his base, FOB Sharana."

"This map (push play to fly over the area) gives a sense of the terrain he would have had to cross."

That's a supplement to the first episode of the new season of Serial, which I've listened to. It's mostly Berghdahl's side of the story — we hear his explanation of what he was supposedly doing — and I didn't believe him. You can listen to the episode here. There's a question at 40:43 that gets a long pause and a "Pretty much." That's when I said out loud: "He's lying."

Anyway, that map makes his story even more absurd.

But then, I listened to the first season of Serial and thought it was easy to hear that the central character was lying, and yet people became intensely involved and got very connected to that person. There's something about the style of the presentation that draws people in and seems to make them want to believe. Unless you believe, why are you listening? Put another way: If you want to listen, you need to suspend disbelief. The art of Serial is that it makes you want to listen.

The podcast "Serial" begins Season 2 this morning — the story of Bowe Bergdahl...

"... the U.S. soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured and held by the Taliban for nearly five years...."

This story—it spins out in so many unexpected directions. Because, yes, it’s about Bowe Bergdahl and about one strange decision he made, to leave his post. (And Bergdahl, by the way, is such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve encountered before.) But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made. Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantanamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn’t: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished....

I haven't listened yet, but I surely will.

And "Serial" has its season 2 subject matter: Bowe Bergdahl.

Rolling Stone reports.

Which statement comes closest to your reaction to the news of the second season of Serial?

I don't know (or don't care) what Serial is.

Another complicated is-he-guilty case. Serial should do a great job.

Ugh. Bergdahl. Hate to think of all the sympathy that Serial will stir up for him.

Might be interesting. I'll check it out.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Here's a guy, Sergeant Bergdahl. We get Bergdahl, a traitor, a no-good traitor, who in the good old days would've been executed, and they get five killers who are right now out on the battlefield."

Said Donald Trump — one quote of many in a Business Insider piece titled "Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas."

Is that headline an attempt at humorously emulating Trump's way of speaking? It must be, and I'm wondering at what point the strategy of regarding him as a clown will be abandoned. I'm giving up my failed strategy, which was: If I don't view him as real, he is not real.

The news of nothing.

Drudge has looked like this for quite a while:



That links to a Daily Mail story — "Obama rules OUT sending troops back into combat in Iraq but promises to review military options – including air strikes" — that includes an effort to extract a comment from George W. Bush:

Former President George W. Bush has been reluctant to weigh in on the latest developments in the region where he spent years deploying military assets that Obama would later pull back.

A request for comment from the former president was met with a non-response from his communications director Freddy Ford, who told MailOnline: 'I don’t have a comment for you. When he left office President Bush decided not to criticize his successor.'

Everyone already knew that, but the Mail made it into something that could be reported, and Drudge is featuring what is, essentially, the news of nothing.

With so many newsworthy things happening right now — the VA scandal eclipsed, the Bratquake reduced to a 1-day story, the Lois Lerner spoliation, Bergdahl (Bergdahl? Who's Bergdahl?), Hillary snapped — the news of nothing rises to the top and just sits there.

What is the ever-enigmatic Drudge trying to say?

Nothing?

"The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder."

"My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness... I will not lose this mind, this world I have deep inside. I will not lose this passion of beauty."

Reading Bergdahl's journal.

"To many of those soldiers, Sergeant Bergdahl was viewed as standoffish or eccentric, smoking a pipe..."

"... instead of spitting tobacco, as so many soldiers do, and reading voraciously when others napped or watched videos. But he was not isolated from his platoon mates, some said. And while he was, like other soldiers in the platoon, often disappointed or confused by their mission in Paktika, some of his peers also said that Sergeant Bergdahl seemed enthusiastic about fighting, particularly after the platoon was ambushed several weeks before his disappearance. 'He’d complain about not being able to go on the offensive, and being attacked and not being able to return fire'...."

From a NYT piece titled "Bergdahl Was in Unit Known for Its Troubles."

Charles Krauthammer supports Obama's decision on Bergdahl.

"Had the choice been mine I would have made the same choice... It’s a difficult decision, and I would not attack those who have done otherwise.... These are dangerous militants, but we have long engaged in and all other countries in the West have engaged in hostage swaps where the West always comes out on the short end...."

Bergdahl as Obama's worst PR nightmare.

1. I'm surprised, with all the scandals Obama has wriggled his way through and around all these years, that bringing Bergdahl back home has hurt him so badly. I think Obama and his people believed that the Rose Garden announcement of the soldier's homecoming would warm American hearts, cleverly distract us from the VA scandal, and count as a positive step toward his long-delayed goal of closing Guantanamo. Moderate Americans would celebrate (or at least not complain about) the soldier's return. And more leftish Americans would get some satisfaction from the progress on Guantanamo.

2. Obama had just — 3 days before — given a commencement speech at West Point that he must have believed would refocus our attention on his distinctive vision of America's role in the world. He stressed our obligation to follow "international norms and the rule of law," expressed pride in "winding down our war in Afghanistan," and recommitted to closing "Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders." His people must have believed this dignified oration would set us up nicely to receive the Bergdahl announcement. The speech got an "icy" reception, but the plan to follow up with the Rose Garden announcement remained in place.

3. Obama and his people knew there would be criticism about his violation of the statute that purports to require him to inform Congress in advance of releasing any detainees, but, as I blogged on June 1st, I think they imagined themselves winning this PR spat:

Go ahead. He's daring you. Perhaps part of his motivation for the prisoner trade was a predicted political boost as the President's opponents are distracted into seeming to complain about the return of a hero and tripping all over themselves as they posture about impeachment.

4. The first comment on my post jumped on my use of the word "hero." The Drill SGT said: "There are a lot of questions about how and where he was captured. None of them make him out a hero." I resisted this new material: "I used the word 'hero' precisely to highlight the nature of the response to the complaints, and anything disparaging to this man, like what you're saying, will redound against Obama's opponents." When I read that now, I think: That's exactly how Obama and his people fooled themselves into thinking they'd win this PR game.

5.  Obama's friends in the press worked the angle I had predicted. Joan Walsh over at Salon had a piece titled: "The right’s unhinged Bergdahl hypocrisy: The ultimate way to savage ObamaShould accused deserters face trial by Bill Kristol before being rescued? Understanding the latest wingnut hysteria." It began: "Of course Republicans are going to compare the prisoner swap that won the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to Benghazi. They both start with B." Actually, I think a lot of us, at that point, had not quite absorbed the name "Bergdahl" and were mentally filing it under that name that looks like "Benghazi." That was a random tough break for Obama — making it more likely that we'll hypothesize screwups and coverups — but it was a deliberate choice to send Susan Rice — who famously propagandized about Benghazi on the Sunday shows — onto a Sunday show to do the propaganda on Bergdahl. George Stephanopoulos gave her a supportive forum.

6. CNN's Jake Tapper broke ranks with the liberal media: "Fellow soldiers call Bowe Bergdahl a deserter, not a hero." And consider that that it was CNN's Jim Clancy who uttered the words "pretty icy" about West Point's reaction to Obama's commencement speech. CNN has problems of its own, and wouldn't it be funny if it could solve them by eschewing the role of PR outlet for Obama and doing some tough journalism? I suspect the ratings (and web traffic) are showing that this "pretty icy"/"deserter, not a hero" material is exactly what CNN desperately needs for its own survival. If so, what a tipping point.

7. The Rose Garden performance gets worse and worse in retrospect as we look closely at a man who was supposed to be scenery for the President: Bergdahl's father. Did Obama's people just assume the parents would be humble, grateful ordinary Americans? Should we give Obama some credit for not locking down the PR?

8. What Joan Walsh called "the latest wingnut hysteria" is seeping out to Democrats. Yesterday, The Weekly Standard found that "Senate Democrats Go AWOL: They had Obama's back on the Bergdahl/Taliban trade. Now they're walking away." Lots of Senators were queried, and only Harry Reid took Obama's side. Everybody else seemed to need to learn more about it before they could express an opinion.

9. This morning, Obama's PR nightmare includes Hillary Clinton attempting to extract herself:  "While still secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was skeptical of early plans to trade five Guantanamo prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, former officials involved in the process told CNN on Tuesday. Clinton pushed for a much tougher deal... Clinton did not trust the Haqqani network holding Bergdahl, they said, and she was wary that the trade would lead to peace with the Taliban."

10. I see that Talking Points Memo is still attempting the old "Obama's in trouble, we need to help" routine: "Conservatives Go From Zero To Impeachment In Record Time On Bergdahl." Whatever you might say about Obama, those Republicans are crazy.

"Trading Private Bergdahl."

That's from Mad Magazine.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

If I've lost Mad, I've lost Middle America. 

"The curious case of Bob Bergdahl’s apparent tweet to the Taliban."

"Bergdahl’s critics view the tweet as another demonstration of the father’s and son’s contempt for their own country. But the elder Bergdahl’s Twitter feed — @bobbergdahl — tells a more nuanced story...."