Psst: David Gregory! You can stop auditioning to fill Jay Carney's White House spokesman spot. President Obama has already appointed someone else. Given his rotten Meet The Press ratings, it's understandable that Gregory would be prospecting for his next position. Even so, his performance on today's Morning Joe was pitiable.
With even liberals like Mika Brzezinski, Donny Deutsch and John Heilemann dumping on the Bergdahl deal, there was Gregory as President Obama's lone defender. Thus: Dianne Feinstein has criticized the lack of consultation? Meh: she's been critical of the Obama admin on other things. And twice Gregory made the argument that Commanders-in-Chief, whatever the circumstances, just don't leave soldiers on the battlefield. That was too much even for Heilemann, who argued that there are limits to what a C-in-C should do, particularly when the soldier in question might have been a deserter. View the video after the jump.
Watch Gregory do his best on behalf of President Obama.
DAVID GREGORY: By the way, Dianne Feinstein has been pretty critical of this administration in the past, over Benghazi, for example. And there's no question that Congress likes to be consulted about these things. But there's tension about whether it has to be when the Commander-in-Chief feels that the moment to strike is right. Look, we still don't know exactly what hose those health circumstances were, right, that necessitated that immediate action . . . The question that I have that I think is a question for this debate for today and moving forward, is whether the circumstances matter, or whether the United States or any Commander-in-Chief will always be committed to rescuing a soldier from the battlefield, no matter the circumstances. So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey said, look, this is an American citizen who is a soldier, who's presumed innocent in this circumstance. He was held prisoner. The war is coming to an end, that's not what he said, but I'm saying, these are truths. The war is coming to an end. There was an opportunity here to get the soldier off the battlefield. That's the bottom line for the judgment the president made . . . Mika, I think one of the questions going back to just the controversy around Bergdahl and the circumstances of his being detained, if he deserted or whatever the circumstances are. I really do think the administration believes and the president believes, look, a bottom line principle to answer Donny's point, too. You get our soldiers off the battlefield, period. If they're prisoners, you get them. And if he committed a crime, then you try him. I mean, you launch that investigation. But you get him off the battlefield.
