This week, Senator Barack Obama made a speech in which he said, “We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.” This statement has angered many families around the US, but more so the families of deceased Iraq veterans than any others. I find it odd that, instead of paying more attention to the over all meaning of his speech, people have been jumping and focusing on those few words.

 Michelle Malkin (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006858.htm) put forward four different quotes, all supporting the war, yet unrelated to Sen. Obama’s speech. One of these was a letter from Cpl. Jeffery B. Starr that he wrote before he died, in case he was killed in Iraq. She argued the the New York Times “attempted to twist [Cpl. Starr's letter] to serve an anti-war agenda”. Before these she put a single article supporting Sen. Obama, directly focused on his quote. The only opinion of her own in this heavily biased article, if you can call a collection of semi-related quotes an article, was at the end: “I could go on, but it would be a waste of breath trying to get Sen. Obama to acknowledge the existence of countless soldiers and their families who reject his patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting view of all American troops as dupes/victims who have squandered their lives.” She spoke of the New York Times twisting words to serve their own purpose…what is she doing herself?

Michelle Malkin submitted one article “supporting” Obama, written by Allah Pundit (http://hotair.com/archives/2007/02/12/video-obama-says-lives-of-troops-killed-in-iraq-were-wasted/). She pulled out the following quote from his article: “Of course he thinks their lives were wasted. Everyone on the anti-war side does; that’s one of the reasons they want to end the war. But they can’t say that because it dishonors the dead so they’re forced into rhetorical pretzels like the one Pelosi tied herself into a few weeks ago with Diane Sawyer. Army Lawyer summed up her position at the time thusly: “They didn’t die for nothing, they died for something stupid.””. She failed to include the next sentence, though, written above the video: “Submitted for your disapproval, then: Obama on the campaign trail yesterday in Iowa…”. This seems to me as if the first paragraph was highly sarcastic, written very unsubtly for those who have enough brains to see it: obviously Malkin does not.

 Obama made that speech to attract votes to his campaign. He was saying simply that what we are doing in Iraq is not wasting lives, but what could have been for those young soldiers who are now dead is lost. There was nothing in his speech that suggested he believed what they had done was a waste of their lives, or that they had died in vain. But I do believe that this small slip of the tongue for him may have cost him a lot of votes, because the media again is attacking him and making him out as a bad person. The only person that the media doesn’t seem to be attacking is Sen. Clinton. Is she the best choice for the democrats? We can save that question for another six or seven months. But for now, those are my thoughts. Tune in next time, people…