A simple 'sorry' would suffice

Dear Editor,

First I would like to send my best wishes to Mark Hebert and hope he gets his health issues resolved successfully and quickly, we're lucky to have him in this town. Get better soon Mark!

Second I'd like to ask, are we adults or children? I remember growing up one of the things both my mother and father would tell me is that, "An adult can admit a mistake and apologize, a child tries to shift the blame and deny it ever occurred." After watching the argument this week about our President's phone call to a bereaved widow of a fallen soldier, I have to ask, can this administration act as adults? First, when asked about the loss of four soldiers in Niger, we heard an attempt to shift blame to past administrations that turned out to be a basically false claim as well as being irrelevant. Really? Why not just answer the question honestly and say you're working on it?

Then the whole dust-up about what was said during the phone call happened. Yes, the President called, both sides agree about that. Maybe he was trying to be sympathetic and consoling, maybe he wasn't and he was just trying to get a difficult job over and done with. We'll never know, we can't see inside another person's mind and see what their motivation is. All that we do know is that the widow wasn't consoled by the message. Why couldn't the President have just said, "I'm sorry my message wasn't received in the spirit in which it was offered. I meant it to be consoling, I'm sorry for your loss and both I and the people of the USA are grateful for the service your husband rendered to our country." And it would have ended right there and then. But no, instead we had to hear a bunch of spin about how the widow SHOULD have taken the message, rather than how she DID take the message. Was it her fault that she didn't KNOW what the President meant when he said those words?

Then this administration trotted out a four-star general to besmirch a U.S. Congresswoman with what turned out to be a total fabrication. And it beggared the question, why was it so wrong for the Congresswoman to listen to the phone call as she had been asked to do by the family, but it wasn't wrong for many people in the President's staff to listen in to the same phone call? Then we had to hear about how wrong it was to debate a four-star general. Sigh, first we have the 1st amendment which means it's not wrong to question anybody. Second, the four-star general wasn't speaking as a general but as the White House Chief of Staff, a politician in a political position. Had the general just said, "I offered my advice to the President on how to handle this phone call and how I received the news of my son's sacrifice. I'm sorry that it didn't help in this case and the wording of the message was poorly received." Again, that would have ended it and they could all go back to the more important job of running the country. So it can be seen that had the administration acted as adults should during any period, the whole incident could have been taken care of and ended. Can't we, as Americans, just grow up?

Allen Porter,

Malta