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During the Civil War and for a time after, the Medal of Honor was damn near rendered worthless from being awarded to every Tom, Dick & Harry that wanted one. From Wikipedia,

“As the only award available during this conflict, almost half of all Medals of Honor presented to date were awarded for actions in the four years of the Civil War.”

Looks like maybe pResident Obama is going to make sure every minority that ever served has one.

Correct. But since WW I, for the most part, the MoH has been awarded for valor on the battlefield. There have always been issues, questions, about whether a recipient merits the MoH, or, for example, the Navy Cross. Much of it is subjective, much depends on the available testimony from those who witnessed the action, and there's always political pressure involved, whether inside the Pentagon or in the WH.

Having been a long-ago Marine officer, I've always read the actual citations that accompany the awards. If you examine the citations for Marines who received the Navy Cross from actions in Iraq/Afghanistan in the last 20 years, it's often impossible to distinguish them from MoH citations during WW II and Korea. Some cynics suggest that many Navy Crosses in recent years would have been MoHs had they been posthumous.

The point is, it'll never be perfect..call it the "fog of war." I do strenuously object to this mass PC upgrading to the MoH simply because of perceived "discrimination" decades past. We just don't know. Also, the MoH is the ultimate "individual" award..here' Obama's morphing it in to a "class of soldiers." It's akin t o giving every youngster in the soccer league a trophy.

Besides, if we're so willing to "upgrade" to the Medal, we should be equally willing to downgrade awards that don't meet the criteria. Nearly all the Medals handed out during the Civil War should be revoked,a s you correctly point out.

Even as late as WW II, the Navy handed them out for "political" reasons. After Pearl Harbor, for the first half of 1942, any submarine skipper who returned from patrol and sunk a Jap ship, even a small cargo vessel, got the Medal. The US was getting clobbered everywhere, we needed "heroes, and photo ops,"..so..that's what they did.