Widow tells Bush: Time to end the war

Greg Sargent interviews Hildi Halley, who lost her husband Patrick in the Iraq War:

“We literally sat knee to knee…I looked deep into his eyes and talked to him about love and losing people and that he was responsible for this. I said, ‘I didn’t vote for you, but you are my President. And you’re not serving me.’”

“I said I believed it was time to put an end to this. His job is to find solutions. I said, ‘You yourself have said you had erroneous information going into this.’”

She continued: “I said, ‘As a Christian man, you realize that when you’ve made a mistake it’s your responsiblity to end this. And it’s time to end the bleeding and it’s time to end the war.’”

Christian men don’t start wars based on deliberately cooked intelligence. Christian men don’t keep sending soldiers to die in a war that admittedly has nothing to do with the terrorists that said war was supposedly going to combat. Ms. Halley, I am afraid, has badly misjudged George W. Bush in this regard.

The Kennebec Journal has a little more:

One anti-war widow said she used the opportunity to voice her objections to Bush’s policies.

“I said it’s time to stop the bleeding,” said Hildi Halley, whose husband, Army National Guard Capt. Patrick Damon, died June 15 in Afghanistan. “It’s time to swallow our pride and find a solution.”

She said Bush responding by saying “there was no point in us having a philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war.”

No, of course Bush doesn’t want a philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war. That would require actually talking about why he started the war, and why he allows it to continue. Can’t have that — especially in an election year.

Once the rabid right-wing blogosphere gets hold of this, Hildi Halley will be in for the same gutless excoriation that Cindy Sheehan has been subjected to… all for the terrible, heinous crime of suggesting that maybe it’s time to stop feeding Americans into the misguided, ineffective meatgrinder that will be George W. Bush’s only legacy.