The New Year Quote by Ed Pastor

A politician’s tightrope walk is right there in the first seven words: “While I do not hesitate to applaud.” Ed Pastor is doing the Washington two-step, signaling loyalty to troops and restraint toward leadership in the same breath. The intent is not just to register dissent; it’s to pre-empt the oldest attack line in American war politics: that criticism equals disrespect.

The subtext is sharper than the polite syntax suggests. “Certain aspects” quietly narrows what he’s willing to bless, implying the resolution is padded with messaging or partisan framing. By separating “our courageous soldiers” from the political machinery around them, Pastor draws a moral firewall: the troops’ sacrifice is real; the resolution’s use of it may be performative. His word choice, “capitalizing,” is a deliberate indictment in the language of commerce, casting the resolution’s sponsors as profiteers of grief and bravery.

Context matters: Iraq-era debates routinely turned on symbolic votes, ribboned with tributes to service members but drafted to corner opponents into a binary: support the resolution or be tagged as anti-troop. Pastor is trying to deny that trap oxygen. He applauds sacrifice while rejecting the instrumentalization of it, reframing patriotism as something that can be exploited by politicians, not merely expressed by them.

It works rhetorically because it reverses the usual moral hierarchy. The real offense, he suggests, isn’t dissent during wartime; it’s using wartime sacrifice as a shield against scrutiny.