Demented, Sickening And Purely Evil; A Rant About Right Wing Attacks On An American POW

I cannot express enough how disturbed I am by the way this country is treating our own returning prisoner of war. Have we lost all sense of right and wrong America? Are we so far gone that we can't imagine what the hell this kid has gone through in the past five years?

I don't know why I should be shocked or surprised at anything we do anymore. All I know is that I spend a good deal of time reading and writing about the news, current events, politics and policy, and very, very few things still bring tears to my eyes, but reading some of the callous, heartless, shameless comments that are the American response to Bowe Bergdahl's release from captivity - this is for the assholes in the world that can still make me weep with despair for what we have become as a nation.

We had a choice, we could save an American soldier or we could continue to spit on our own Constitution by holding men who have been pronounced guilty of crimes that still remain unnamed, men that have been locked away for more than a decade, without a trial or the right to present a defense against their accusers. I am so sick of us pretending we care about things like the Constitution or the Bible, for that matter. Why keep up the pretenses? We don't practice what we preach. We don't do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We don't behave with decency, not to the foreigner at our gates nor to OUR OWN.

I am SICK of hearing Christians claim that they are better than the Taliban. The American TEAliban makes my stomach turn and my heartache. The Gitmo prisoners will return home as heroes. They will be welcomed with open arms. Our own son, who has been tortured and imprisoned, will come home to the hate and the bigotry and the condemnation that has come to represent this country. I can't even put into words how much I despise what is happening to America. I can't even begin to describe the anger and the anguish I feel for this kid and his family.

How do you sleep at night? What kind of sick fantasies and twisted delusions of yourselves as decent human beings make it so that you feel OK getting up in the morning and looking at yourselves in a mirror? I can't imagine how you spin your vile existence to yourself, in order to justify the evil thing that you have become.

And as for you, fellow soldiers of Bowe Bergdahl, this is how you treat a comrade in arms? Go ahead and get your two minutes of fame on Fox News. All I can say is that you're damn lucky the same didn't happen to you. It takes a lot of gull to sit on TV and speculate about things you don't really know.

WE LEAVE NO-ONE BEHIND. That is the code of the US military. I guess you've forgotten it. Or maybe you just need to believe certain things, to alleviate your own feelings of guilt about having left a fellow soldier behind? I could almost understand that, if you had kept it to yourself, instead of going on TV to broadcast a lot of baseless speculation, which does nothing but serve to dishonor a brother in arms. I'm having a hard time forgiving you for that. I'm sure there were things you did while overseas that you'd prefer not to have broadcast all over the country prior to your homecoming, had you been taken captive instead. Do those things define you? Should they be used as an excuse for the country that sent you over there in the first place, to just abandon you, as if you were less than a human being?

Every day I struggle to believe that there is still good left in this country, in spite of the teabaggers, in spite of the hate rhetoric and the shameless, disgusting behaviors of some of the humans that we've chosen to represent us as nation. Do these people really represent half of our population? If so then we're on a fast path to Hell and nothing we tell ourselves about why the things we do are 'justified' is going to stop that.

Could there be any clearer sign of hearts that are 'altogether hardened'? People with empathy or remorse or shame or sympathy for others; in other words full blown sociopaths, are rising to positions of power all around us.

 If this isn't who we are and isn't who we want to be as a country, WHY do we allow this kind of discourse into the national conversation? Think about it, this is what some people call a media? This is what they now think of as a News organization? It's a shameful display of all of the ugliness that mankind can and does possess. We exalt it and put it on a pedestal for the whole world to see.

I am not often at a loss for words. I am often disgusted, revolted and ashamed by the actions of some of our politicians and media representatives, but I can generally put the level of disgust I feel into some kind of organized rant. But this is just too much. HOW DARE THEY treat a United States prisoner of war with such hate? HOW DARE THEY spew this kind of hate toward a family who has not seen their son in five years?

I am outraged, appalled, shocked, sickened, horrified, disgusted, repulsed, saddened, ashamed, and a whole lot of other things, all at the same time. But I take hope in knowing that I am not alone in those feelings. Have they finally gone too far, for even some of the most brainwashed of their fan base

Don't you feel better than the Taliban now? Don't you feel more righteous?

How dare they convict this kid without a trial?! How dare they accuse, judge, shame, blame... I just pray that we are better than this. I pray that we as a country rise up and demand this stop right now. Do we have a line? Don't you think we should draw it HERE?