Posted on 08/14/2005 8:53:24 AM PDT by nwrep
Aug. 22, 2005 issue - The grieving room was arranged like a doctor's office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside.
President Bush was wearing "a huge smile," but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he got to the last widow, Crystal Owen, a third-grade schoolteacher who had lost her husband in Iraq. "Tell me about Mike," he said immediately. "I don't want my husband's death to be in vain," she told him. The president apologized repeatedly for her husband's death. When Owen began to cry, Bush grabbed her hands. "Don't worry, don't worry," he said, though his choking voice suggested that he had worries of his own. The president and the widow hugged. "It felt like he could have been my dad," Owen recalled to NEWSWEEK. "It was like we were old friends. It almost makes me sad. In a way, I wish he weren't the president, just so I could talk to him all the time."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
More like the MSM is trying to separate itself from this Kookburger.
Not a bad story but they also could have included some of the stories of families who fully support the President and our troops. One question I have is...why do these people blame our President? Why don't they ever blame the people who actually killed their son? The terrorists and insurgents who kill not only soldiers but innocent people? After all, these soldiers did enlist of their own free will. Many of them re-enlist. I just don't understand why they can't see who is actually responsible for the deaths.
We don't hear about this too often. If this was the Clinton era, each and every one of these meetings would be used as a PR scam. This whould never have happened had we (1) Taken Saddam out the first time,(2) Bill Clinton had been more interested in our security than in sex and (3) if the ATF and FBI had focused more on terrorism than on trying to get guns away from law-abiding citizens. A subject by the way that really ticks me off and we never hear about in the MSM.
Thank you for that link, G.Mason. I've saved it to another file.
Great story, one that ultimately conveys the enormous sacrifice paid on behalf of freedom, and to a very small degree the inevitability of war, of this war at this time, within the larger statecraft that we practice.
GWB is one of the good guys and anyone who cannot see the visual toll this war effort has taken is either stupid or ignorant or both.
I'm a tolerant person, but find little for Sheehan or others of her ilk. She's allowing her understandably raw emotion to tarnish the 'memory of the loved and lost,' if I might be permitted the reference.
Great Story.
Remember this ad about "Ashley" in Ohio. Another great story.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1249884/posts
Thanks for the ping!
Let's document this; if not malfeasance it certainlny appears as incompetence.
Oh, yes, as a control, try to rate another story on the site and see what happens?
I did that with an ANTI-BUSH story, and it wouldn't tally my low rating, or increment the counter...
Can we get a bunch of Freepers over there to try and nail this down?
Cheers!
They realize about 20 years too late that they cant make money and offend their readers. Do not ever buy that rag.
There have been many such stories about this man ever since 9/11. Sheehan is an aberration in more ways than one. People with wicked agendas aren't worthy of attention.
Which doesn't make any sense.... I wonder what smear job Newsweek has up its sleeve?
Maybe the Lord was trying to soften her hardened heart by putting it in the President's mind to touch her in that way. He could have touched her arm or her hand, or even her face, but it's interesting that that touch seemed to be just what she needed.
A very good story that shows just how petty Cindy Sheehan is being. She's trying to paint the President as someone who doesn't care about the men and women he sends into harm's way, and this shows that it is just not true.
Ascione's family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way.
It's Voodoo! ;)
It is also certainly possible the young man joined the Army, in part (emphasizing, in part,) because he didn't want to live with his loser mother...
Now his mother is so guilt-ridden she was such a lousy parent and lousy wife (where is his father?) and it took the army to be his mother and really make a man of him, she is jealous, angry and blaming everyone else...
"To oppose something my husband lost his life for would be a betrayal."
-Inge Colton, whose husband, Shane, died in April 2004 when his Apache helicopter was shot down over Baghdad.
More complicated is the question of whether Bush's suffering is essentially sympathetic, or whether he is agonizing over the war that he chose to start.
Bush didn't start the war. The terrorists did. This could have been two presidential terms arguing about education and taxes. 19 men on 9/11/01 decided to change that, not W.
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