Democrats, Deleting Post Featuring Iran War Dead, Learn That Americans Hold Memorial Day Sacred

Americans are sending a message ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday. By forcing the Democratic Party’s X account to delete a Memorial Day post using lost service members against President Trump, citizens are making a point. They’re unified in holding the fallen sacred, and woe to politicians that use them to exploit political divisions.“Today,” the Democratic Party’s X account wrote on Monday, “we honor the American heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in Trump’s war with Iran.” Photographs of the 13 service members lost in Operation Epic Fury accompanied the post, which was “ratioed” by negative reactions before it was yanked.According to a 2008 directive from the Department of Defense, military personnel are not allowed to “use or allow the use of” images “of themselves in uniform … in any campaign media.” To be sure, the dead cannot give consent. Democrats raised the same issue when Mr. Trump stopped at Arlington National Cemetery in August 2024.Gold Star families whose loved ones were among the 13 killed at Kabul airport during America’s withdrawal invited Mr. Trump to pay his respects. The president posted a video of the visit captioned “should have never happened,” but didn’t mention President Biden. Federal law prohibits political activity on that sacred ground.A member of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment also known as The Old Guard, places flags in front of each headstone at Arlington National Cemetery. AP/Andrew HarnikA left-wing group, VoteVets, called Mr. Trump’s visit “sickening” and an “affront to all those hundreds of thousands of families who never agreed to allow their deceased loved ones to be dragged into politics.” The statement is a better fit for Monday’s X post. The fallen were digitally disinterred for clicks, and Americans objected.The Gulf War commander, General Norman Schwartzkopf, captured how those who laid down their lives for liberty are held above politics. “We noticed when our blood was shed in the desert,” he told Congress in 1991, “it didn’t separate by race, but it flowed together, because that’s what your military is.”As soon as the Civil War ended in 1865, citizens set out to honor the fallen on both sides and Republicans were jeered for “waving the bloody shirt” in campaigns. Even though Democrats had been “the party of secession, sedition, and slavery,” their presidential candidates won the popular vote in 1876, 1884, 1888, and 1892, twice losing in the Electoral College.When President Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son, Quentin, was shot down behind enemy lines in World War I, German soldiers buried him with full military honors and built a makeshift memorial. Yet Berlin envisioned a propaganda coup. They distributed picture postcards featuring the 20-year-old airman’s corpse and mangled Nieuport 28 fighter plane.President Trump at Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, 2024. Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesThe stunt was an infamous backfire. Germans recoiled in disgust, noting that unlike many of their well-heeled countrymen, Quentin and his three brothers were on the front lines. Instead of boosting Kaiser Wilhelm’s war effort, the macabre mind game hardened resolve in Allied capitals to “Halt the Hun.”In the 1976 vice-presidential debate, Senator Robert Dole hurt President Ford’s chances by saying that the four conflicts America had fought in the century had been “Democrat wars.” He first insisted that he hadn’t said it and then, when presented with the tape, that he didn’t think that they’d been “partisan wars,” just the result of “weakness.”Calling the current conflict “Trump’s war” is a similar misfire. The invasion of America’s embassy at Tehran in 1979 alone was an act of war. President Reagan sank the bulk of Iran’s navy in 1988. President Obama and Mr. Biden both ordered strikes on Iranian assets. There was bipartisan agreement on using force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.“For nearly half a century,” a White House statement said in March, Iran “has killed and maimed American citizens and service members through its own forces and proxy militias.” Examples ranged from “220 Marines and 21 other service personnel” killed at Beirut in 1983 to “at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq.”Democrats were slapped down for sullying Memorial Day, politicizing those lost from Bunker Hill to Bastogne and Indochina to Iran. Our 250th Independence Day will give them a chance to demonstrate that they got the message: Whatever divides Americans, there are some days that are made for waving not the bloody shirt but the flag.

Democrats, Deleting Post Featuring Iran War Dead, Learn That Americans Hold Memorial Day Sacred

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