A July 2 Washington Times editorial calling “for exhaustive work to improve the nation's complicated military medical system and veterans' health care” claimed that “the left” has used “the military-health-care mess as a political cudgel whose real aim seems to be to remind listeners of the decision by President Bush to enter Iraq.” To support this claim, the Times wrote that the “most egregious” example was “Sen. Barack Obama's [D-IL] February 'wasted lives' remark which the senator said he came to regret, and for which he apologized repeatedly” -- a reference to a February 11 speech in which Obama said of the Iraq war: "[W]e now have ... seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." But in highlighting Obama's comment as “the most egregious” of the “ill-advised thinking ... on the left,” the editorial ignored that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made a similar remark during his February 28 appearance on CBS' Late Show with David Letterman. McCain said: “We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure [in Iraq], which is American lives.”

Moreover, by labeling Obama's remark as the “most egregious” example of the left using “the military-health-care mess as a political cudgel,” the Times falsely suggested that Obama's comment concerned the controversy surrounding care of soldiers and veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as detailed in a series of Washington Post articles. In fact, Obama's February 11 comment was about the war in Iraq: “We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged -- and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.” Indeed, Obama made his comments before the Post published its first article on conditions at Walter Reed on February 18.

From the July 2 Washington Times editorial:

The flurry of media attention directed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal has subsided, but not for lack of activity. It is time for exhaustive work to improve the nation's complicated military medical system and veterans' health care inside the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, though, a kind of farce of Washington politics is underway in which the scandal is used by some for political effect, who are then opposed by others who fail to understand the magnitude of the problem and thus sound rather callous.

[...]

Outside such hearings, one hears two kinds of ill-advised thinking which seem to take such facts less seriously than they should, one frequently heard on the left, the other on the right. On the left is the use of the military-health-care mess as a political cudgel whose real aim seems to be to remind listeners of the decision by President Bush to enter Iraq. The most egregious, later retracted, was Sen. Barack Obama's February “wasted lives” remark which the senator said he came to regret, and for which he apologized repeatedly.

The other, from the right, is a kind of misguided fiscal prudence which opposes typically reasonable legislation designed to improve circumstances for wounded war veterans. Most egregious was Mr. Bush's “pork” remark and his veto threat regarding recent Democratic proposals. But last week in a contentious Senate Veterans Affairs Committee meeting, Sen. Larry Craig, Idaho Republican, warned against the fiscal consequences of a hybrid-benefits proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont Independent, in the wake of an Institute of Medicine determination that the VA's means of judging disability is “hopelessly outdated.”