Oct 1, 2007

Vets Hit Financially


Question: Why is the support and righteous indignation directed on behalf of veterans more likely to be offered by those less inclined to send the troops in harm's way?

Answer: Those inclined towards peace tend to have more appreciation and respect for people generally, and are less inclined to use other people, especially troops, as a means toward achieving selfish goals.

Associated Press writers Jeff Donn and Kimberly Hefling have a piece that is worthy of the rapt attention of Rudy Giuliani and the novo chickenhawks about the financial plight of our wounded veterans.

Write Donn and Hefling:


He was one of America's first defenders on Sept. 11, 2001, a Marine who pulled burned bodies from the ruins of the Pentagon. He saw more horrors in Kuwait and Iraq.
Today, he can't keep a job, pay his bills, or chase thoughts of
suicide from his tortured brain. In a few weeks, he may lose his house, too. Gamal Awad, the American son of a Sudanese immigrant, exemplifies an emerging group of war veterans: the economic casualties.
Bush continues to duplicitously borrow for time in his enterprise of making the Iraq War the next president's concern and political problem, and yet still postures and plays the tough man with, as Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold famously described: The "... casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results."

I keep hoping for an Army-McCarthy moment where the demagogues Bush and Company are revealed to be the dangerous cowards and liars that they are, but it's different today when demagoguery is a well-crafted propaganda and public relations enterprise immensely more sophisticated than anything Joe McCarthy could ever dream of.

One hopes that the plight of veterans (and lack of respect given to veterans generally) such as reported by writers Donn and Hefling punches through the propaganda haze, revealing the administration's apathy and even hostility for our soldiers and marines.

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