Decision to Stiff Landstuhl Was Obama's Alone

The postmodern lefties are trying to spin Obama's skipped Landstuhl visit as the Pentagon's fault:

I've just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama's canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn't visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks.

Note how this is an unnamed Pentagon source, which is strange, as the matter's straightforward Defense Department policy, not top-secret classifed information.

There's no link at TPM other than Jeff Zeleny's piece at the New York Times, "The Cancellation of Obama’s Troop Visit."

Here's the key passage from Zeleny:

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, issued a statement emphasizing that the Pentagon did not cancel Mr. Obama’s visit.

“Senator Obama, in his official capacity, is always welcome to visit Landstuhl or any other military hospital. But it is not permitted to bring with him campaign staff. His team was notified of that, and they made a decision not to visit the hospital. But we were ready and willing to host him there. In fact, we had made arrangements for his campaign plane to land at Ramstein, and to take care of the campaign staff and press in a passenger terminal there, while the senator and senate staff, if he liked, went on to visit wounded warriors. They made a decision based on their own calculations not to visit. Senator Obama, like any other member of the senate, is always welcome to visit our wounded warriors or our military hospitals around the world. But they do so in their official capacity, and not as a candidate. He can come in and bring senate staffers as well, if he likes, but campaign staffers and press are not permitted to accompany him. That would be a violation of DoD directives.”

There you have it. The Pentagon did not cancel Obama's visit.

No one is responsible for this disaster but Barack Obama and his incompetent advance team.

But note TPM's pathetic spin attempt:

It's unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon's directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon's directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.

Bottom line: We're not seeing any issue here at all.

No issue at all? You've got to be kidding! Obama could have visited the troops by himself, with a military escort. And we do have transcontinental telecommunications. A simple phone call takes care of those "Pentagon directives."

I'm simply flabbergasted sometimes at the lengths the postmodern left will go to reduce uncontestable facts to some squishy dream world of illusion.

Maybe Talking Points Memo doesn't even read the stories to which they link?

But, more likely, this is an attempt to provide a postmodern narrative for the press, with the intended effect of washing Obama's massive military misstep away.

I shouldn't be surprised, that's for sure, since as Dr. Sanity notes, the standard recipe for postmodern talking points is to completely ignore reality, reason, and truth:

Those who live in the wonderful world of denial go through their daily lives secure in the knowledge that their self-image is protected against any information, feelings, or awareness that might make them have to change their world view. Nothing - and I mean NOTHING - not facts, not observable behavior; not the use of reason or logic; or their own senses will make an individual in denial re-evaluate that world view. All events will simply be reinterpreted to fit into the belief system of that world--no matter how ridiculous, how distorted, or how psychotic that reinterpretation appears to others. Consistency, common sense, reality, and objective truth are unimportant and are easily discarded--as long as the world view remains intact.

Most people want to believe there's an objective reality.

Unfortunately, in the left's version of relative truth all matters of substance are reduced to a subjective new age spin, with the effect in this case being to abuse the troops for political purposes.

Change we can believe in...