January 13, 2007 - “Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay any particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”  That is what Senator Boxer said to Secretary of State Rice. That is what the rumbling right has characterized as Senator Boxer attacking the Secretary for being a single, childless woman.  In an Editorial Murdock’s New York Post called it a “low blow”.  Tony Snow joined in the chorus and the Secretary herself sang a new refrain.

If you examine what the Senator actually said instead of the fictionalized remarks and invented motives being bandied about the Limbaughsphere, the righteous indignation of the Right is certainly unjustified.  The Senator’s remarks simply reminded the Secretary that the decisions she makes come at a cost and that cost doesn’t fall on either the Secretary or the Senator.  In is significant that the Secretary did not see an attack in the context of the hearing until the Administration spinners and their talk show mouthpieces had distorted the facts to create one.

It is an old tactic and one we are used to coming from the right side of the political aisle.  Divert the public’s attention from the merits by accusing the other side of low and despicable tactics.  Diversion, distortion, and derision are constantly substituted for discourse and debate.

The fact is that no member of the Cabinet or of the House or Senate has been paying the price for this Administration’s disastrous decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As the President pointed out as he advanced his New Way Forward, that price has been paid by the brave men and women deployed in harm’s way and by their families.  There are two many empty chairs at the dinner table and when we look forward to this war without an end we see many, many more empty chairs.  Those are the ones who pay the price, who make the sacrifices necessary to give effect to the Secretary’s decisions.  Neither the politicians nor the rest of us are willing to become engaged in this fight and the Administration has not the courage to call upon us to do so.

It is well that the President shed a tear while he posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to a brave hero that he sent to die.  Perhaps with that tear the President came a wee bit closer to understanding the price he asks ordinary Americans to pay in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The answer to the Senator’s question is both simple and straight forward.  Who pays the price?  In the first instance it is the men and women of the armed services and their families.  They pay in lives lost and lives ruined.  But blood is not the only cost.  There is the cost in treasure.  You and I and our children and our grandchildren must repay the money borrowed to finance this war.  The highest cost is neither paid in blood or in treasure.  It is the cost to our common ideals; to the treasured freedoms to which we give lip service; to our liberties for which our fathers and their generations paid throughout the first two centuries of our nation’s story.  Who pays that cost?  We all do.