Our putative Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill has been very careful to distance herself from most controversial issues no matter how important – she was essentially one of the reasons we didn’t manage to get a rational energy policy out of those heady days between 2008 and 2010 when Democrats controlled the house and Senate. It seemed like the rampageous Missouri Tea Party scared her nearly to death. Apart from a few issues involving women’s rights, she’s been careful to devote her energies to issues that awaken the least amount of partisan rancor possible. And even when she takes up one of those, she often tries to mostly walk the straight and narrow center line while stepping every so often to the right.

An example would be the legislation she sponsored to deal with sexual assaults in the military. She was very careful to avoid stepping on rightwing toes and in distinction to colleagues such as Senator Kristin Gillibrand (N.Y.), she held out for a bill that kept prosecution of sexual crimes within the military chain of command. So it’s to be expected that when the pentagon yesterday issued a report on military sexual assaults that it claimed showed improvement, although the actual numbers didn’t seem to justify such optimism:

The Pentagon’s update to the president on the military’s explosive problem included a Rand Corp. survey that found the number of service men and women who reported unwanted sexual conduct had dropped to about 19,000 from about 26,000 two years ago. The military didn’t survey troops to determine how many sexual assaults occurred in 2013.

But skeptics observed the 19,000 number had barely changed since 2011. They also zeroed in on several other findings:

62 percent of victims said they endured retaliation for reporting assaults, a number unchanged since a survey two years ago.

The number of cases sent by commanders to trial this year increased by only 12, from 484 to 496.

The number of so-called restricted reports of sexual assaults – anonymous reports where victims don’t pursue prosecution – increased by 13 percent.

Victims in 10 percent of cases stopped participating in the military justice system, slightly higher than in 2009 before reforms.