I remember hearing about the Tillman brothers last Thanksgiving. Paul Beston wrote in The American Spectator last December about "The NFL’s Lonely Hero."Pat Tillman was the starting strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals when the 9/11 attacks occurred. He played out the 2001 season and then with his brother Kevin, a former minor league baseball player, enlisted in the Army Rangers. In doing so, Tillman walked away from a three-year, $3.6 million dollar contract with the Cardinals for an $18,000 salary and plentiful opportunities to get his head shot off. That hasn't happened yet, and God willing it won't. But the pay cut kicked in right away.It seems that God wasn't willing. Tillman was killed in Afghanistan this week. White House spokesman Taylor Gross spoke for President Bush today:
"Pat Tillman was an inspiration both on and off the football field. As with all who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror, his family is in the thoughts and prayers of President and Mrs. Bush."But don't expect George to attend Tillman's funeral, or that of any other soldier he's sent overseas to make the "ultimate sacrifice."
You probably know by now about the husband and wife working in Kuwait who were fired after the wife's photograph of coffins draped in US flags turned up in their local paper, or the website that published similar coffin photos after a Freedom of Information Act request. What you probably didn't know is that one network has yet to show these images. Guess who? FOX. I guess on some level they recognize that President Bush is responsible for the deaths of US soldiers serving needlessly in a conflict that he created, just so he could run as a "wartime president."
Correction: FOX did eventually show the coffin photo, but with a predictably pro-Bush slant on the story, "Bush Concerned About Privacy on Coffin Photos."
