The above video is a campaign commercial for Democratic congressional candidate Dan Grant, who’s running for the house seat in Texas-10. Although 2008 is still a bouncing baby of a campaign season, Mr. Grant has seized an almost insurmountable lead in the competition to see which candidate can run the most morally contemptible campaign spot. Mr. Grant served in Iraq as a member of the State Department. He is to be praised for the fact that he served his country (and the Bush administration) nobly, and one should further laud him for settling whatever political differences he had with the administration in the realm of politics rather than in his capacity as a State Department employee. But the commercial pictured above is a wretched thing. In the spot, Mr. Grant says in a voiceover that we need a new direction in Iraq. Fair enough. What’s unfair and perhaps even grotesque are the images that accompany Grant’s garden-variety voiceover. While Grant speaks, a video plays of a slain soldier’s flag-draped coffin being wheeled away from an aircraft. In other words, Dan Grant, who boasts in the ad of having “been to Iraq” without mentioning in what capacity he went to Iraq, uses the corpse of a fallen American soldier as a campaign prop. One must wonder if Mr. Grant got the permission of the fallen soldier’s family to use his remains in this fashion. Even if he had, that still wouldn’t excuse this depressing moral exercise. Obviously, the fallen soldier didn’t get a vote. Most likely, Dan Grant and his campaign have no idea of the name of the soldier whose coffin they use as a prop. And most despicably, on its website the Grant campaign crows, “Our 30 second TV spot is galvanizing Democrats, Independents, and even moderate Republicans who are way ahead of the leadership in Washington, D.C. It’s time to end these aimless Bush-Cheney policies in Iraq–now.” If Dan Grant and his campaign understand the magnitude of their moral trespass, they hide it well. HT: Matt Yglesias
