The reason you have allegedly smart liberals like Chris Hayes moronically implying that the U.S. should pay any price to bring a missing soldier home, even if he went missing deliberately, is because they can’t make the argument they really want to make. The argument for defending a deal this palpably terrible is, simply, that they’re stuck with it now thanks to O and can’t afford to let the White House bleed endlessly over it. There’s no reason on the merits why this should be a partisan issue: There’s credible evidence from the men who served with him that Bergdahl deserted and there’s documentary evidence that the Taliban Five are highly dangerous. You shouldn’t have to hand in your liberal card for thinking, “Yeah, that’s a dumb deal.” But with elections five months away and Obama already wounded by a scandal related to veterans, they can’t leave him exposed to more bipartisan criticism. The Bergdahl swap is being “politicized” — by the left, of necessity.

Which is why this lame “story” is suddenly a big deal on Twitter.

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…

Reached by phone, [Richard] Grenell’s partner at Capitol Media Partners, Brad Chase, confirmed that the firm had been helping the soldiers get their story out.

“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.

The accusations against Bergdahl have been public for at least two years, thanks to Michael Hastings and Rolling Stone. Cody Full, one of the men from Bergdahl’s unit who suspects him of desertion, tweeted his suspicions for hours on Saturday night, two days before any media found him. No one seriously believes that the allegations against Bergdahl are being fed to his squad mates by the GOP; on the contrary, I can only imagine how insulted Full and his comrades would be to stand accused of making up lies about a POW to serve some political party’s agenda. But all of that is beside the point. The point of a piece like this, treating it as unusual that partisan operatives might liaise for people who share their criticism of the other side (remember when Anita Dunn’s firm began representing Sandra Fluke?), is to imply that there’s some sort of partisan dirty trick being played without ever clearly stating what that trick might be. The “argument,” such as it is, is that there are Republican fingerprints here and therefore you don’t have to pay close attention going forward to these years-old, wholly independent accusations against Bergdahl from fellow veterans. It’s another partisan food fight, “Berghazi,” as Ed Schultz sneeringly called it yesterday.

I eagerly await the interviews with Bergdahl’s supporters from his old unit, assuming the DNC can find any. Exit quotation from this miserable, frightened partisan hack, who now occupies a seat in the U.S. Senate:

Really sad to watch Obama haters attack this kid who CHOSE to fight to protect the rest of us, just to score political points.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 3, 2014

Here's the story: "GOP Strategists Arranged Interviews With Angry Members Of Bergdahl's Platoon" http://t.co/biXxwZDsi4

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 3, 2014

Are the military’s many, many Bergdahl skeptics now “Obama haters” by definition?