Why is the far left so enamored with the phrase “Bataan Death March” when describing their extended primary? Here’s Frank Rich today:

IT’S a nightmare. It’s the Bataan Death March. It’s mutually assured Armageddon. “Both of them are already losing the general to John McCain,” declared a Newsweek columnist last month, predicting that the election “may already be over” by the time the Democrats anoint a nominee.

It so happens that in another Sunday paper, the Las Cruces Sun-News of New Mexico, there is an obituary of a one Weldon C. Hamilton, a survivor of the Bataan Death March in 1942. Here’s an excerpt from the obituary:

On the Death March, more than 10,000 men died, including approximately 1,800 members of the New Mexico National Guard.
“It was miserable,” said Hamilton, in a 2002 interview with the Sun-News. “I was so tired I felt like I couldn’t take another step. But then I would hear someone being shot. It was like the Angel of Death was right behind me.”
But Hamilton willed himself to keep going. He did that for each of the 1,256 days he was a prisoner of war.
“I was determined to survive,” he said. “I didn’t make it through that march to die in a prison camp.”
He was imprisoned in the Philippines for more than two years, first at Camp O’Donnell, where more than 25,000 men died in less than two months. Arriving at Camp O’Donnell after completing the gruesome Death March, Hamilton often told a chilling story of the prisoners’ first encounter with the camp commander.
“He came out in a nice white uniform, with his saber dragging on the ground,” Hamilton said. “I’ll never forget what he said: ‘If you think you are lucky to have escaped with your lives, I tell you the lucky ones are already dead. We are enemies. We will always be enemies. My only interest is in how many of you are dead each morning.’”
He was later sent to Camp Cabanatuan, where 3,000 Americans died. Hamilton then was taken to Japan aboard one of the notorious “Hell Ships.”
At the end of the war he was enslaved at a coal mine 30 miles from Nagasaki, where he saw the cloud from the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
“My father told us it looked like it was pink and purple,” said Donald Hamilton, who lives in Sebastopol.
After liberation, Hamilton continued his military career in the U.S. Air Force and retired as a chief warrant officer in 1969. His military decorations, include The Presidential Unit Citation, with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and the Bronze Star.
Always gracious and humbled by the public tributes given to Death March survivors, Hamilton often downplayed any notions that he was a hero.
“I’m made from tough stock,” was Hamilton’s simple explanation. “I really don’t feel like I did anything brave. I did what most people would do in my situation — I survived.”

There is absolutely nothing comparable between the actual march and the Democratic march to their Denver convention. Nothing.