Politics & Government

Claire McCaskill on Sex Abuse in the Military: Your Views?

A war of words erupted last week between the Missouri senator and a Wall Street Journal columnist. What do you make of the dust-up?

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill made national headlines last week when she fired back at a Wall Street Journal columnist who didn't have kind things to say about her battle against sexual abuse in the military and, in particular, the appointment of a female lieutenant general as vice commander of the Air Force Space Command.

The drama started in a June 17 column in the WSJ by James Taranto, who said Lt. Gen. Susan Helms' career was being stalled by McCaskill, who placed a "permanent hold" on her appointment to the position. Why? Because Helms apparently gave clemency to an officer under her command who had been convicted by a court-martial of aggravated sexual assault.

This, of course, flies in the face of McCaskill's well-publicized efforts to root out this behavior in the military ranks.

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Columnist Taranto used words such as "histrionics" and "a war on men," as well as an effort to "criminalize male sexuality, to describe McCaskill's tactics. He implied that the underlying criminal conviction was a poor result in a he-said-she-said case. But by all means, read the column and draw your own conclusions.

McCaskill, for her part, fired back in The Daily Beast on Thursday:

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But, the sad fact is that Mr. Taranto’s disregard for the severity of sexual assault is not nearly as uncommon as it should be—in either civilian or military culture. That one of the most respected and widely read papers in the country saw fit to repeatedly offer Mr. Taranto such a large platform is a reminder of how important our efforts, and those of many of my colleagues, to tackle the prevalence of sexual assault in our military, have been—and of how far we still have to go.

McCaskill said Helms' actions in granting clemency showed poor judgment. And the work she's undertaken in the Senate, she said, is designed to "remove the ability of a commander to substitute their judgment, and sometimes also their ingrained bias, for that of a jury who has heard the witnesses and made a determination of their credibility and the facts of the case."

Again, here's her column. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Who is right? Is McCaskill doing the right thing in her fight? What do you think of her campaign against sexual abuse in the military? Is she interjecting herself in the realm of the military chain of command, or she dead on? And what do you make of the column by Mr. Taranto, a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board?


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