I’ve been meaning to blog on the Pat Tillman story for a while now–but Kevin Drum just did the job for me better than I could have done. If you’d rather not read the linked post, it boils down to this: Tillman turned down a lucrative football career to fight in the war–in Afghanistan. Instead he was sent to Iraq, a war he disapproved of and felt was illegal. Later, he was sent to Afghanistan, where he was killed by friendly fire. The Bush administration, stinging from the Abu Ghraib scandal, needed a poster boy, so they lied and used Tillman’s death to punch up their own agenda. They hid the fact that he died under friendly fire and made him out to be a pro-Bush all-American hero. In fact, he was pro-Kerry and had arranged to meet with anti-war advocate Noam Chomsky after he got back. When his parents found out how the administration had lied and used their son for political gain, they were, in a word, pissed. And yet to this day, most people still believe the Bush lie that Tillman was pro-Bush and pro-Iraq and that he died for Bush’s cause and “the war on terror.” They were right about the hero part, and, ironically, how Tillman stands as a symbol of how we cannot let the troops down–just not they way the GOP usually plays it.