It is "reprehensible" that President Joe Biden would tell the family of one of the soldiers killed in a drone attack last weekend in Jordan about his son Beau's death in connection with his service in Iraq, retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt said on Newsmax Friday.
"It's wrong that he would make it about his plight," Holt told "Wake Up America." "That's not empathy. That's not sympathy. It's reprehensible."
Biden, in a phone call with the family Tuesday with the family of Sgt. Kennedy Sanders, a 24-year-old Army Reservist from Waycross, Ga., told her father, Shawn Sanders and mother, Oneida Oliver-Sanders, that their daughter would receive a posthumous promotion from specialist to sergeant, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which also reported a video of the phone call.
When Sanders' mother said that meant a lot to the family, Biden replied: "It means a lot to me. My son spent a year in Iraq; that’s how I lost him."
Later in the call, Biden said that his son was "living near a burn pit in Baghdad. He came down with stage 4 glioblastoma brain tumor, and we lost him too."
Beau Biden, who served in Iraq from 2008 to 2009, died from glioblastoma, a brain cancer, in May 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
"When you're a first-level commander, you serve on what's called a notification team," Holt said. "In your area, if there is an American soldier or an American service member who has died, you are on call to go make that notification."
Sanders' mother thanked Biden for sharing his experience, and Holt commended the family for being as "gracious as they were in this time."
"There's nothing in this world worse than outliving a child, and in their greatest time of grief, this nonsense comes back in this embellishment," said Holt. "It's an absolute lie. It's horrific and also projects who this man is on the world stage as we're trying to combat this weakness in our foreign policy and not project any more weakness. We see these wars escalating and spiraling and potentially, we're going to be involved in one."
Such lack of leadership, he added, "is why we're in peril from potentially a global war today."
Retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the president of Project Sentinel also was on the program, and commented that the "only bright spot" was that Sanders was promoted as a way of honoring her.
The administration "disrespects and dishonors the military because they simply see the military as another tool they can use to achieve political gains," said Shaffer. "It's disrespectful. It's dangerous because our adversaries see the weakness and the fact that President Biden again tells a bold-faced lie."
Shaffer added that he suffered permanent scarring in his sinuses from the burn pits in Afghanistan, but "for Biden to actually use this as something to try to gain sympathy for his failing policies and failing administration is simply beyond the pale."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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