Jack at TigerHawk is right that Andy Rooney would've done better to put his point another way. (Of course, I'm mincing words, Jack refers to Rooney as "a turd", and that's his right)

There's a lot going on here though. I don't think Rooney's words would have received as much attention -- and certainly not a Drudge link -- if one of the words he used hadn't been "hero". Jack himself concedes that some of the points Rooney makes are accurate. This leaves a couple of possible perspectives on Rooney. First of all, he could have made his point otherwise, so going out of his way to say they "aren't heroes", regardless of context, is to be seen as a slap in the troops' face. I'm of the "my beef is with the administration, not the troops" set, so that position on Rooney's comments is obvious; many of our young men and women are in a very tough position in Iraq, particularly lately, so I'd be annoyed if I were there and heard those comments, regardless of why I was there.

That being said, two other things. First, is this an example of Ted Kennedy out-of-context syndrome? Last week, Ted Kennedy discussed comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, in the context of the dishonesty that led us into an escalation of both wars, and not of the "we lost that war, we're losing this one" variety. However, others, from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson to Instapundit, have attacked Kennedy's comment by interpreting it in the latter context, when Kennedy clearly meant the former. (Glenn Reynolds then ridiculously criticized Kennedy because gosh, he should have known that the right would have taken the quote out of context, so it was Ted's fault)

In this case, Rooney made a significant short statement -- "aren't heroes" -- in the context of points that are generally accurate, yet is receiving grief from pro-war conservatives in a manner similar to Kennedy. From here, the difference is subjective: Kennedy's comment begs for contextual expansion, while Rooney's is, let's say, much less careful and much more blunt. One could say it's a symptom of Rooney being an anti-war liberal, but I get the feeling that being a cranky 90-something has a way of loosening the tongue. Andy Rooney is Andy Rooney, turd or no.

But my one problem with Jack's analysis of Rooney's column is on the suicide issue:

He is also disingenuous. He supports his argument with very misleading evidence:

One indication that not all soldiers in Iraq are happy warriors is the report recently released by the Army showing that 23 of them committed suicide there last year. This is a dismaying figure. If 22 young men and one woman killed themselves because they couldn't take it, think how many more are desperately unhappy but unwilling to die.

Of course, Rooney did not bother to look into suicide rates for the American population as a whole, which are quite obviously available on the National Institutes for Mental Health website. According to my back of the envelope calculation, the soldiers in Iraq are committing suicide at a rate no greater than typical for Americans of that age cohort and gender (men over 20 commit suicide at the more than 20 per 100,000 per year).

That may be the case, but the military, by nature, is a disproportionately controlled environment, where a greater amount of attention is paid to individual morale, so in an ideal, or normal situation, the military suicide rate should be lower than the general one, right? (Access to automatic weapons notwithstanding of course.)

NOTE: Regular TFM blogging should resume tomorrow in the afternoon/evening.