Senator Kennedy on the deaths of U&Q:

"It's progress," said Senator Ted Kennedy, about news that the Hussein brothers had been killed in a US military air raid. "But I still think we need an overall strategy," the Massachusetts Democrat said.

"American servicemen are at risk every single day, and it seems to me we ought to find ways working through the United Nations and Nato, as we did with Bosnia and Kosovo, to help provide relief for our servicemen, and help construct Democratic institutions," said Kennedy.

You'd think he'd be a bit happier, but I guess he's a little concerned about the fact we are bringing guys who pick up women and then leave them for dead to justice.

Something I have seen around the net is a negativity about the attention that PFC Lynch has received, a backlash of sorts. Some of it seems to be engendered in the whole Hate Bush thing, where any positive feeling about something from the Iraq war must immediately be quashed or discredited for fear that something positive may accrue to Bush. There is also a sentiment among some service members that PFC Lynch is receiving an inordinate amount of attention, and that it is unfair. (And it is unfair, as people who made greater sacrifices are unremembered by the public, like the two soldiers killed today.) In both cases, Lynch's receiving a Bronze Star Medal is derided with "you're not a hero for getting in a car crash." You can see both here. You can also read my comment at the bottom, which I am expanding on a bit below.

About Lynch's Bronze Star, let's review, shall we?

The criteria for award of the Bronze Star:

a. The Bronze Star Medal is awarded to any person who, while serving in any capacity in or with the military of the United States after 6 December 1941, distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service, not involving participation in aerial flight, while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

b. Awards may be made for acts of heroism, performed under circumstances described above, which are of lesser degree than required for the award of the Silver Star.

c. Awards may be made to recognize single acts of merit or meritorious service. The required achievement or service while of lesser degree than that required for the award of the Legion of Merit must nevertheless have been meritorious and accomplished with distinction.

Let us go through those for PFC Lynch and her fellow soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Co who also received the Bronze Star.

In the military. Check.

After December 6, 1941. Check.

Engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force. Check.

Not involving participation in aerial flight. Check.

Those are all the AND parts of the equation, and also the non-subjective parts. Now there is an OR, which also contains the subjective part:

distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service

Heroic OR meritorious achievement or service.

I have not seen that she was awarded the Bronze star with a "V" device for valor. That is how it is awarded if your Bronze Star award is for heroism. Without the "V" device, it is for meritorious acheivement or service.

Was her service meritorious? The people who made the award thought so, along with all of the other soldiers involved. You might say "well anybody can get captured," and I suppose that is true enough, and doubly true of someone who was unconscious and injured in the course of a firefight.

The Bronze Star, sans "V" device, is about like an ARCOM (Army Commendation Medal, a good but not great peacetime medal) in the course of a war. Anyone who was in the service during Desert Storm might remember the talk that Bronze Stars were handed out like candy. I have friends who worked in Battalion Adjutant shops - the personnel offices - that received the word the BN would receive X number of BSM's. and then they did the citations from there. Not the other way around. So don't get the idea that the BSM means that a person is a hero. I have other friends who received the BSM during ODS, and they never fired a shot. They didn't even get in a "car accident."

I get perturbed when people, especially soldiers, get all bent out of shape over the attention paid to PFC Lynch. I would ask if any of them would trade the conditions for the attention. I suspect none of them would. And I don't begrudge anyone medals - hell, they don't cost anything in the grander scheme of things, and it is the least the service can do for its members. It can't pay them more, and can't necessarily promote them, but they can give them colored bits of cloth they can wear on their uniform.

And if that colored bit of cloth helps bring young people like PFC Lynch and SGT Miller (who received the Silver Star) into the service and recognize them for what they have done and help them feel proud of it, then let's go ahead and hand them out like candy.

Don't get me wrong, they can't be given for nothing, or their perceived value goes away. But if there is something there worth recognizing, then let's go ahead and do so.

I read the Washington Post and I wonder if these guys live in the same world I do. This morning, for example.

On the op-ed page, a former Clinton cabinet member recommending that we appease the North Koreans. How cliché. And some bit from Harold Meyerson, editor at large at American Prospect that explains in full detail the problem with the Democrats, though what he demonstrates is not exactly what he meant:

If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it's Gephardt. As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush's Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month. Gephardt's endorsement last fall of the administration's war resolution effectively derailed a bipartisan effort in the Senate to require the White House to win more international backing.

There was supposedly a method in this madness: By taking the war issue off the table, Gephardt argued, the Democrats could turn the midterm election campaign to questions of domestic policy, presumably their strong suit. We'll never know if this could have worked, because Gephardt and his fellow congressional leaders never developed a domestic message.

Note well - the Democrats position on the war on Iraq was not about national security - defending the United States - but it was a political message. Even to a liberal it is not considered possible that a Democrat's support of the war could be based on the principle of keeping Americans safe. That is very telling.

And then, finally, the front page story about Uday and Qusay is about how it will affect Bush's popularity. If you want to find out about why it is a good thing (beyond the domestic political angle) that those wild and wacky Hussein boys are graveyard dead, you have to turn to the Style section. Yeah, wouldn't want to put something that bolster's the President's position up there in front of the paper. No, let's put it back in the fluff, with the gossip column and comics.

Well, at least it isn't the New York Times.

UPDATE: Jonah notes the Meyerson piece, too, and makes more trenchant observation:

one might ask why Bush is denounced by folks like Begala, Krugman and McAuliffe as a Hitler-like aggressor who went to war to distract from domestic problems while Gephardt gets a free pass for endorsing a war (and giving it all the bipartisan cover it needed) simply so he could focus on domestic issues.

And a link to the op-ed.

First, a poem:

gellin chaos commercial uday rape overlord felon like nations coalition hussein white wear sailors scholls list why the central iraq were hey and iraqi french ted rall information minister wood you chipper chickens moron majority midget embedded monkeys faction war are prowar special redneck forces reporter air france monkey bongs

From here.

Can't figure out how I got referred from here or here. I think it's a glitch.

That should boost my google ratings. And for all those who complain "How come you don't give away mp3's like the cool bloggers?" I have my answer - I do!

Check out Mirrors of Venus. Tell me what you think. No, it isn't me.

That heading is a bit like Instapundit's "cats and dogs living together" all by itself. Reading the op-ed in the Washington Post was almost shocking.

I worked on a project with DC schools for a year and a half, and they have huge problems that vouchers are not going to fix. But they will help kids escape from a school system that is failing them.

One of the things I learned while working with DC schools was that there are already Federally funded vouchers in the District. In fact, these vouchers are available across the country. They are part of "Special Education." If you don't believe me, check out this memo from Virginia. It explains the process for processing and reporting reimbursement for students that attend private K-6 programs under the auspices of special education.

Basically, the purpose behind this is that there may be a determination that a student's needs are not able to be met by the public schools, and that they may only be met by a private institution. Now it is different from vouchers because the school districts actually administer the money, and not the parents. But the bottom line is that this is public money going to private institutions, and it has yet to destroy public education. And Special Education is beloved by Democrats who hate vouchers.

But there is a dirtier secret about this program in DC. Parents will go to court to get their children declared special education so that they can then get them into these private programs. There are lawyers who specialize in suing the schools, and by the way, operate assessment centers that provide expert testimony that the student cannot be accomodated in the public schools. Sometimes the programs that are then ordered by the court cost $150,000 a year. Compare that with the average $10k plus average that Senator Feinstein refereces (and if you take the FY 2004 budget of $847M, it's more like $12k per student), and you see that it doesn't take too many of these court ordered cases to impact the other students.

There is also a private voucher program in DC funded by philanthropists. It has a limited number of slots that it can provide. Parents in DC wait in line overnight when the applications are made available.

It is obvious that the parents of DC realized long ago what Mayor Williams and Senator Feinstein have - the DC schools are not educating their children. What also appears to be dawning on these Democrats is that giving people what they want is kinda like democracy.

I watched O'Reilly last night (the bloom is definitely off his rose, by the way) and there was a discussion about how the President's poll numbers were falling due to "the chaos in Iraq." Larry Sabato was on as a guest, and he suggested that the President "wasn't getting his message out."

O'Reilly opined that the President ought to come on his show (or, humbly, on some other venues) and admit that he made a mistake in his estimate of the aftermath.

Now of course this was last night, prior to the news on Odai and Qusay or however you spell them. But the problem wasn't one of the message not getting out, but having the wrong message. Up to now, the message has been, 1) that we are winning overall, and 2) things aren't as bad as they seem.

Those are true, and letters like this one support that. (Sullivan must have watched Fox last night, too, with that mention of Dick "Chicken Little" Morris.) But, if you think about it, "things are not as bad as you hear" is not great PR. Even if it is absolutely true, it just doesn't sound good. It sounds like spin. And it is defensive.

We are making great progress in the War on Terror, but the story of "soldier killed in an ambush" every other day sounds like we are losing the battles - in the absence of another story.

This is not just the President's problem. This is the Army's problem, or more accurately, CENTCOM's problem. In the absence of a story of a win, stories of losses will proliferate. And while long term we are making a difference in Iraq, without concrete achievements, people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about it may not grasp the larger story. Concrete achievements like today's firefight that killed Saddam's sons.

Obviously those events cannot be planned that way. They can't announce "next Tuesday we will capture or kill Saddam Hussein." But they can establish modest goals for the near term that can be achieved and shown to be victories. Things that have to be done and would be done anyway. But that happen now unheralded.

The best way to get the message out that we are winning is to win. And that has import in Iraq, and here.