The new president’s address to Congress was praised for a more grown-up tone, though this largely consisted in his inviting Democrats to join Republicans in enacting policies they have opposed for decades. If they didn’t join in, Trump implied, they’d be un-American naysayers. So much for cooperation and compromise.

The only point on which nearly universal agreement was heard was in finding Trump’s honoring of fallen Navy Seal Ryan Owens deeply moving, accompanied as it was by a two minute standing ovation for his weeping widow who was seated next to Jared and Ivanka.

I said almost universal. To his credit George Will, no lefty, said that ever since Ronald Reagan began the practice of using heroes or victims as political props he has found it unseemly, exploitative and cynical, stagecraft in lieu of statecraft. Amen.

If you can’t make a case for your policies without displaying the grief or suffering or ills of others, however, willing they may be in our fifteen-minutes-of-fame era, then you don’t deserve to win that case.

We all experience the tragic emotions of pity and terror when shown the human face of war, pestilence, famine and death, but though a politician may be able to use a tearstained war widow to rouse strong feelings that doesn’t necessarily mean the policy being proposed is a wise one.

In this case, the use of Mrs. Owens’ agony was particularly repulsive since Trump has never been a full-throated proponent of our long, flawed adventures in the Middle East. He has said he was for the war, then against the war, then for the war as it suited his purposes. He is far more an isolationist than an interventionist, more anxious to close the borders than to wage foreign wars.

And in this case Trump seems to have approved offhandedly without serious study an intelligence-gathering foray the Obama administration had put on hold. When it went bad, degenerating into a firefight that got Owens and dozens of civilians killed and three other Americans wounded, Trump tried to dodge responsibility. His use of Mrs. Owens looks like one more attempt to distract attention from his fecklessness.

First, Sean Spicer blamed the Obama administration for the debacle, then Trump doubled down on that falsehood and added that it was his generals who “lost Ryan.” It is not without interest that Senior Chief Petty Officer Owens’ father, himself a veteran, has demanded an investigation into the flawed mission and refused to meet with Trump when his son’s remains arrived in Delaware, not wanting to be a part of a moment that Trump would use as a self-aggrandizing photo op.

It is also worth noting that, after getting criticized for approving the botched operation, Trump appeared to suggest he would defer in future instances to the military to decide which operations to undertake. That would seem to suggest he is more interested in plausible deniability than in risking bad PR if an operation fails or causes casualties. But there’s no way to duck responsibility.

The President is called the Commander-in-Chief for a reason. If it happens on his watch, it is his glory or shame, so he had better pay attention to what’s being done in the name of the American people, not try to keep it at arm’s length. But in the age of Trump we are a long way from the days of Harry Truman who put a sign on his Oval Office desk that proclaimed “The Buck Stops Here,” not just as a reminder to those who reported to him, but to himself.

Trump needs to man up if he’s going to put Americans in harm’s way. He dodged the draft during the Vietnam War with mythical bone spurs, but he can’t dodge his responsibility now. He is now the Commander-In-Chief, not the Buck-passer-in-Chief.

In a larger sense the intensity of the response to Owens death and the sight of his bereaved widow is salutary if it reminds not just the president but the rest of us to take the employment of our military with deadly seriousness. This isn’t a video game.

Perhaps after long, wearying years of low intensity skirmishing, and with a military made up of a small fraction of the citizenry, many of us are too comfortably insulated from the reality of how hellish war really is, and that the end that is sought had better justify the sacrifice it entails.

During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we lost two Americans a day killed, but in our parents or grandparents day, during World War II, the body count was 297 a day — week after week, month after month, year after year. A country needs to be pretty damn certain it knows what it’s getting into before committing our sons and daughters lives to combat. Fine speeches and brief applause do nothing to fill the permanent void left by a combat death for his father and mother, his widow, and his orphaned children.