The most recognizeable symbols of power in the US, if not the world, reduced to crumbling, radioactive ashes in crisp, shining 3-D, all due to the incompetence and stubborness of its leaders?

Of course it's not a political statement! :p

I think it is just being practical. In the event of an apocalyptic situation, you think nobody is going to try and turn DC into glass? If not enemies or uneasy allies, then ourselves as we riot ourselves into oblivion. When the chips are down, all bets are off, and clashing metaphors WILL be mixed.

There's no way it could be a political statement, I mean it IS our national capitol. If you were an enemy of the US and you wee going to suddenly nuke the hell out of the US wouldn't you hit the national capitol just on the off chance you take out most of the national leadership? Plus, the rest of the word of Fallout is an irradiated wasteland, doesn't this make since?

I'm sorry, why are trying to make this into a political statement?  Haven't they noticed that this is the 3RD Fallout game?

There are two other Fallout games(ignoring the crummy console ones when interplay was bleeding for money), the "the nuke distroyed world is now a wasteland" plot has been well established for quite some time, and it isn't surprising that Washington DC --the "head of the US"-- is among them.

Not surprising to me that people WANT TO make it into a political statement when it is NOT.  Yes the Whitehouse got nuked, but something like that is obviously a target with all the other countries out there.  Also there is the time frame, I think I remember it being in an alternative reality revolving around the time of WWII....

Another good point, how many movies, books, etc do the same thing?

Geez.  When did everybody get so touchy all of a sudden that now you can't show a famous city, building or monument being blown-up or in ruins without people questioning your intent?  I've seen hundreds of post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi movies made between the 1950's to the 1980's where you saw famous cities like New York and D.C. either destroyed or in ruins (Logan's Run and Beneath the Planet of the Apes just off the top of my head).  And nobody complained then.  We saw the White House and the Empire State Building get blown to smithereens in Independence Day and nobody complained then either.  Nobody as I recall questioned the filmmakers' poltical motivations then.  Japan got nuked TWICE and they've been making movies of giant monsters destroying Tokyo for years.  You don't hear them bitching and moaning.

This smacks of around the time just after 9/11 when everybody got into a tizzy about depictions of the World Trade Center on film and in video games.  Microsoft had to remove them from the edition of Flight Simulator at the time and Activision had to remove them from their Spider-Man game.  The box cover art from Red Alert 2 had to be changed as it showed New York under attack (although they left the missions involving the Pentagon and the WTC unchanged).  There was even some serious talk about removing the WTC from all movies that depeicted it, like it never existed.  (Incidentally, whatever I think about Steven Spielberg these days, I have to give him props for sticking to his guns when he said he wouldn't remove the WTC when A.I. was coming out on DVD) Thankfully cooler heads prevailed before the trend got out of hand.  Sensitivity is one thing, but when you get to the point of revisionist history, that's something else.

Still it's like ever since then whenever in important place is seen destroyed, now everybody has to question the motivations behind it.  I have to agree with Bethesda; just as with 9/11 the timing may be unfortunate,  but it was completely coincidental and there was no way they could have known the game would be finished and released when it is.  They shouldn't have to be questioned or taken to task for it, nor should they be made to feel they should change it or reschedule the release date out of "sensitivity." 

Give me a break.

My only problem is that by setting the game in such a vast urban area, they are kind of stripping it of the whole "post-apocalyptic spaghetti western" feel that the other two games had. But I definitely never got the impression that Bethesda was trying to make some sort of political statement. However, I also don't remember the other two games going into such detail about why the war happened, and I certainly don't remember them having the vague relevence to real life current events.

Even so, I'm totally willing to except that they chose to place the game in DC simply because the city has made relatively few appearances in games. It's the same reason I didn't really think twice about RE4 taking place in Africa. I was too busy thinking "Hey, I haven't played that many games set in Africa, this should be cool!" People need to realize that, as a medium for storytelling, videogames have to take place somewhere, and it's not always an attempt to rattle the cages. Sometimes it's just because the developers wanted a cool backdrop.

Beat everybody ten bucks that a Fox Noise pundit will pick up on this and accuse the video game industry of Far Left trechory by the election.