After nearly five years, Bowe Bergdahl, a 28-year-old Idahoan and the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan, is finally coming home. The Obama administration made the announcement during the weekend, framing the deal that swapped Bergdahl for five Taliban-affiliated GuantĂˇnamo Bay prisoners as an example of two U.S. promises: to leave no man behind and to finally, mercifully, and after nearly 13 long years, begin to end the war in Afghanistan. For Bergdahl and his family, the move is a blessing. For those who doubt the administrationâ€™s commitment to ending the war, it is a reassurance. And for the loudest members of the far right, it is a mistake, a capitulation, a disgrace. 
 
 Their argument, in brief: By agreeing to trade prisoners of war with the Taliban, Obama made the U.S. look â€” what else? â€” weak. â€śYou blew it again, Barack Obama, by negotiating away any leverage against the bad guys,â€ť wrote the perpetually enraged Sarah Palin on her Facebook page. The deal, argued Palin, had â€śdestroyed troop moraleâ€ť while causing â€śOsama Bin Laden's partners in evil crimeâ€ť to â€śjoyfully celebrate.â€ť What really infuriated the half-term governor and former vice presidential candidate, though, wasnâ€™t so much Obamaâ€™s actions as Bergdahlâ€™s. The price the administration paid for liberating him, Palin intimated, was simply too high. He didnâ€™t deserve it. How come? Because he expressed â€śhorrid anti-American beliefsâ€ť and deserted his fellow soldiers prior to his capture. 
 
 As you might expect from any Palin story, there are some issues. For one, whether Bergdahl found himself under Taliban control because of bad luck, as the administration claims, or because he decided to abandon his post is up for debate. (And keep in mind that, even if he had deserted, that hardly makes it ethical for the government to abandon him to his captors.) For another, Palinâ€™s note about the deal lacks some crucial information â€” like the fact that the men released from GuantĂˇnamo will have to spend at least a year in Qatar, or that the U.S.â€™s impending cessation of the war in Afghanistan would necessitate the release of the Gitmo detainees anyway. But for all it lacked in terms of responding to this relatively simple news story in an informed, accurate and insightful way, Palinâ€™s angry Facebook missive was great in one respect: It was a perfect example of what happens when soldiers refuse to live up to the far rightâ€™s fantasies. 
 
 Weâ€™re all familiar with how conservatives â€” but especially extreme ones like Palin â€” deify, romanticize and claim ownership of the men and women in the armed forces. We all remember the 2004 Republican National Convention, when President Bush all but dusted off that iconic green â€śMission Impossibleâ€ť flight suit in order to portray himself and his party as the sole guardians and stewards of the military. We all remember the countless times during the Bush years when a Republican or a conservative would ask an antiwar Democrat or liberal why they so hate the troops. We expect to see right-wingers genuflect before the Platonic ideal of an American warrior. We expect to hear more stories about Marine Todd. 
 
 Less understood is that when a member of the military fails to adhere to the far rightâ€™s rigid formula of what a soldier should be (nationalistic, religious, obedient; conservative) right-wingers like Palin come down on them like a ton of bricks. Where they once were heroes of almost mythic proportion, now they become charlatans â€” or maybe even traitors. During these moments, the far rightâ€™s hatred for the apostate soldier can only be understood if itâ€™s recognized as a mirror image of their usual reverence. Itâ€™s not just that Sarah Palin is disappointed with Bergdahl for loathing the war in Afghanistan so much that he was â€śashamed to be an Americanâ€ť; itâ€™s that she now considers Bergdahl to be someone who is worth so little that the presidentâ€™s acting to secure his life and liberty is, effectively, an insult to the rest. You know that old truism that nothing can turn to hate as quickly as love? This is what that looks like in politics. 
 
 Itâ€™s not just Bergdahl and Palin, either. Think about how much the far right loathes John Kerry, how ruthless and vitriolic was its campaign to discredit him in 2004. That had much to do with base tribalism, of course; Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president and thus, to some degree, inevitably the temporary locus of all evil. But it also had much to do with the fact that Kerry first made a name for himself as perhaps the ultimate apostate soldier of the modern era, the man who showed that you didnâ€™t have to be a draft-dodging longhair to consider the war in Vietnam a sinful mistake. John Kerry was a soldier, a decorated soldier, and yet he didnâ€™t consider (the draft-dodging) John Wayne the exemplar of American virtue. His comeuppance for that transgression was a long time coming, but when it came, it was, even for politics,Â remarkably nasty. 
 
 But if you think this might all have more to do with partisan politics and believe, perhaps, that the far rightâ€™s hatred for Bergdahl and Kerry says more about the current president and secretary of state than anything else, there are plenty of other, less prominent examples. Thereâ€™s the veteran who was publicly accosted by gun fetishists for having the audacity to be a military man who nevertheless thinks thereâ€™s a right and a wrong way to own a gun. Thereâ€™s the soldier who failed to live up to the far rightâ€™s definition of warrior sexuality and was booed in response. There are the parents and brother of Pat Tillman who, once they stopped being useful props for a story of noble martial sacrifice and started asking justifiably angry questions, transformed into â€śgracelessâ€ť and clueless pawns of anti-American filmmakers. Thereâ€™s Cindy Sheehan. 
 
 Taken together, the far rightâ€™s dehumanization of the American soldier is clear. If he or she is willing to promote the Sarah Palin version of patriotism, honor and masculinity (or at least allow themselves to be used for that purpose), they are not human beings but rather legends and gods. And if they refuse, they lose their humanity once more, now becoming contemptible beyond all measure. Either way, they are not individuals â€” complex and mysterious and sacred â€” but rather means to an end that is, fundamentally, about their self-styled defendersâ€™ ideological satisfaction. This, it seems to me, is an exceedingly twisted way to support our troops. ||||| Several soldiers who served with Bowe Bergdahl, the recently freed U.S. prisoner of war in Afghanistan, would like to tell you how to deal with that dirtbag. They don't want to get into the politics, but they have ideas. Would you like to book them for your show? Just call the Republican strategists representing them. 
 
 Many soldiers who served with or searched for Bergdahl after he was taken prisoner in Afghanistan are justifiably angry about the circumstances surrounding his Taliban capture. The preponderance of the evidence suggests he probably deserted his Army post, and the search for him cost American materiel and lives. But rather than waiting for a military process to answer those questions and pronounce judgment on Bergdahl—the Army's top general, in fact, said today that charges are still possible—several of the soldiers have agreed to participate in a GOP-run dog-and-pony show, swift-boat style, for electoral advantage. 
 
 How do we know? We read it in the New York Times this morning: 
 
 The release of Sergeant Bergdahl (he was promoted in captivity) has created political problems for the Obama administration, which is having to defend his exchange for five Taliban detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but it also presents delicate politics for Republicans who are attacking, through surrogates, America's last known prisoner of war... "Yes, I'm angry," Joshua Cornelison, a former medic in Sergeant Bergdahl's platoon, said in an interview on Monday arranged by Republican strategists. "Everything that we did in those days was to advance the search for Bergdahl"... "He wouldn't drink beer or eat barbecue and hang out with the other 20-year-olds," Cody Full, another member of Sergeant Bergdahl's platoon, said in an interview on Monday also arranged by Republican strategists. "He was always in his bunk. He ordered Rosetta Stone for all the languages there, learning Dari and Arabic and Pashto." 
 
 Okay, but they are soldiers who were there, and they're just giving the facts, right? 
 
 The furious search for Sergeant Bergdahl, his critics say, led to the deaths of at least two soldiers and possibly six others in the area. Pentagon officials say those charges are unsubstantiated and are not supported by a review of a database of casualties in the Afghan war... A review of the database of casualties in the Afghan war suggests that Sergeant Bergdahl's critics appear to be blaming him for every American soldier killed in Paktika Province in the four-month period that followed his disappearance. Mr. Cornelison and Mr. Full both said they wanted to see Sergeant Bergdahl court-martialed as a deserter. "I'm not going to speak on the political, but I think that now that he's back, he needs to be held accountable," Mr. Full said. Mr. Cornelison echoed Mr. Full. "I won't get into the politics, but now that he's back he needs to be held 100 percent accountable," he said. "For putting myself and 29 other people in my platoon in hell for 90 days." 
 
 Not that this couldn't be predicted: As we noted yesterday, Cody Full, one of the soldiers provided to the Times by those GOP flacks (he's already made the rounds on Fox News, as well), has spent the last few weeks on Twitter castigating "libtard[s]" and decrying minimum wage hikes. 
 
 All soldiers have the right to relate their stories. Listening to them adds to our understanding of their lives and experiences, and it gives them agency and closure that doesn't always come at the end of their tour. Sometimes that entails an emotional rant—one that makes listeners uncomfortable—and that's okay. 
 
 But when you massage that emotion into a prepackaged, bloody-shirt-waving, data-denying political missile concealed as a neutral account—"one soldier's story"—you're "speaking on the political" before you even you open your mouth. 
 
 Update: Via Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed: 
 
 WASHINGTON — A former Bush Administration official hired, then resigned, as Mitt Romney's foreign policy spokesman played a key role in publicizing critics of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the released prisoner of war. The involvement of Richard Grenell, who once served as a key aide to Bush-era U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and later worked for Romney's 2012 campaign, comes as the Bergdahl release has turned into an increasingly vicious partisan issue... 
 
 Grenell and his current business partner, Brad Chase, have spent the morning angrily tweeting that while they are the "Republican strategists" identified by the Times, they are not Republican strategists. They simply gathered all these soldiers to trash Bergdahl and the DOD and President Obama out of their desire to get the truth out, because there was clearly no possible way that could have happened without them. 
 
 Media bookers who brought the soldiers on air seem to feel differently, according to Gray: 
 
 "Obviously Ric is a well known Republican and these guys found him on Twitter and reached out asking for help in getting their story out," Chase said. "Ric obviously saw that this is something that needed to be told and came to me and others in our firm, and I and some of the others determined that this was a story that we wanted to work on." Chase said the New York Times' referring to them as "Republican strategists" was "100% factually inaccurate" because he himself is not a Republican. But a producer for the Michael Berry show, a radio show that one of the soldiers spoke on told BuzzFeed that Grenell was the point of contact for the bookings. 
 
 So let us clarify: Brad Chase is not a "Republican strategist." He voted for Kerry! He is simply working for Republican strategist Richard Grenell and uses his Twitter feed to antagonize Democrats and has campaigned to get the Keystone XL pipeline approved, boost "clean coal," support fracking, and limit Medicare coverage, and just happens to be helping Grenell in this well-intentioned campaign to get earned media for soldiers to opine on politics above and beyond their experience levels in a way that could score points against the Obama administration in an election year. 
 
 Now, stop politicizing this!
– The world has been hearing lately from soldiers criticizing freed soldier Bowe Bergdahl. While they have a right to their opinions, much of the publicity they're currently getting is thanks to a "GOP-run dog-and-pony show" reminiscent of the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, writes Adam Weinstein at Gawker. For evidence, he points to the New York Times, which spoke to several of these soldiers. The piece notes that the interviews were "arranged by Republican strategists." What's more, according to the Pentagon, claims of deaths linked to the search for Bergdahl aren't backed up by data. Both soldiers who spoke to the Times say they don't want to get political. But when you're supporting a "data-denying political missile" by calling it "a neutral account … you're 'speaking on the political' before you even you open your mouth," Weinstein writes. At Salon, Elias Isquith notices a similar problem: When soldiers don't conform to flag-waving GOP "fantasies," they're turned from heroes to "charlatans—or maybe even traitors." Click for his full piece; Weinstein's is here.