Haaretz: Veterans Today Writer Is Just a "Conspiracy Theorist"

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat Vietnam veteran, among other colorful pursuits.

You know not to ask him about his service, but he's pretty descriptive when he's in the mood to talk. [Duff is pictured at right in 1969 in China Beach.]

One of his topics of concern now-a-days is the war-all-the-time obsession of the state of Israel. Predictably, this has earned him the enmity of a Haaretz columnist who brands Duff as a "conspiracy theorist" this morning.

So to Danna Harman:

• Yes, Israel has no influence over American foreign policy.
• Yes, Israel has no Lobby and no power over the U.S. Congress.
• Israel has no intelligence agencies.
• Israel has no propaganda machine.
• Israel is not an occupying power in the occupied territories.
• Israel does not bulldoze houses.
• Israel did not kill Rachel Corrie.
• Israel has never attacked Lebanon and Gaza.
• Israel has a wonderful human rights record.
• You get the point: Israel is just a poor country with no military, no imperial ambitions, and certainly nothing but love for Islamic people the world-over.

Two Wars Down: An Ungrateful Nation Now Turns on Its Veterans

- We can afford wars, but not the people who fight and serve, say Alan Simpson, James Webb, ... -

By Gordon Duff in Veterans Today

A week ago, we marched out of Iraq, leaving 50,000 'administrative' troops and tens of thousands of contractors behind. They perform no useful purpose of any kind, no more than the original attack which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates now openly refers to as unnecessary and wrong.

The war that never should have started cost America 3 trillion dollars, much of it unaccounted for. Along with the thousands of American dead and the untold devastation in Iraq, the war also cost America the health and welfare of up to 400,000 of her veterans, America's children. A generation of young adults, another generation of our best and bravest stand betrayed.

We have money for fraud of every kind, projects paid for but never finished, weapons stolen, defective or never delivered, buying poisoned water for our troops at five times the cost of French Wine, I could go on for hours, the list is endless.



This week, when Senator's Alan Simpson, the wild-talking Wyoming Republican and now formerly a stalwart veterans' advocate Daniel Akaka talk about saving money, it is to come from payments to veterans for "presumptive" illness.

Don't believe it's just these two, its the whole gang of them, with few exceptions, and its not the first time. When Bush gutted funding for Veterans and up to nine-million disability claims related to war wounds and the endless environmental crimes against our troops shredded or shelved, even our mainstream veterans organizations stood behind him.

I spent two hours on the phone with a Vietnam veteran I have known for 35 years. He has both a son and son-in-law seriously wounded from Iraq. His 30 years in government and 28 years in the military, many years working with veterans, gave him the skills to help his own family negotiate the minefield of bureaucratic insanity servicemen and women are faced with when returning from war, used up, smashed, maimed or poisoned, discarded and left to die.

How many veterans died with claims in processing? How many died of undiagnosed poisonings or waiting for that medical appointment that never comes? It isn’t thousands or tens of thousands. Is the number as high as a million? It may be, we aren’t allowed to know.

Sarah Palin Smackdown! Elites Run for Cover

Update: Those not yet convinced of the brilliance of this magnificent woman can see the video below.

Sarah Palin's address at the Tea Party Nation (TPN) convention in Nashville and follow-up Fox News interview broadcast Sunday morning dealt a crippling blow to the political hopes of American liberals, elitists, socialists, and all manner of Wiccans.

Such elitist luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Jeff Gates, Uri Avnery, Gordon Duff and Mr. Know-it-all Glenn Greenwald over at Salon were schooled Palin-style, as she reportedly "bounded onstage to cries of 'run, Sarah, run' and then delivered a stinging rebuke of President Obama while striking a populist, even folksy tone. Serving up fiery rhetoric with a broad smile, she attacked the administration's policies on the economy and on national security, assailing in particular the decision to read Miranda rights to the man accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day," the birthday of the Lord (Philip Rucker and Ann Gerhart, Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2010).

Five years after Palin's church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, launched a crash spiritual project protecting Palin from “the spirit of witchcraft,”—ultimately seeing her elected as governor of Alaska where she served a brief tenure while also running as the 2008 vice-presidential nominee for the Republican Party—Palin's paid speech at TPN sent Israeli critic, Jeff Gates, fleeing out of the country to Pakistan where Gates reportedly will be meeting with elements of the American ally's large Islamic population, planning the next caliphate.

Assuming the national political stage after her wildly successful book tour ended in December, Palin brandished on her lapel a small pin composed of two flags, those of Israel and the United States, as she offered advice and a warning to President Obama on the policy of not waging war against Iran in support of Israeli militarism.

Reports Mike Madden (Salon):

'Say [Pres. Obama] played the war card,' she said, casually name-checking Pat Buchanan, whose column apparently inspired this bit of analysis. 'Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided to really come out and do whatever he could do to support Israel -- which I'd like him to do. That changes the dynamics and what we can assume is gonna happen between now and three years. Because I think if the election were today, I do not think Obama would be elected.'

It's not so much that Palin thinks Obama would declare war on the 17th most populous country in the world just to win re-election. It's more that if he did do something like that, it would give people second thoughts about his failed presidency.

Another noted critic of Israeli militarism and the apocalyptic-Christian rapture alliance, Gordon Duff, a combat Marine Vietnam War veteran and senior editor of Veterans Today, was unreachable by phone this morning.

Duff went into hiding where he is "reconsidering his anti-American ideology" and asking himself why he "hates America" after viewing the Palin address on C-Span's Recent Programs, said a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

In a related development, an examination of the comments on a recent piece at Veterans Today, Christians Desecrate Wiccan Religious Site at Air Force Academy, reveals that commenting Wiccans and humanists' e-mail suffixes often end in "edu," demonstrating that many readers of the popular site's Wiccan piece are elitists.

Meanwhile, another snotty female elitist living in DC, Wonkette, was largely silent on her site, apparently cowed by Palin's address that was delivered just months after the elitist had derided Palin as "Clown Moose" and "Noted Dingbat."

Said a Palin supporter living in Wisconsin who refused to give his name to a "liberal-looking" questioner, "You elitists can take your fancy footnotes and your rules of inference and stick 'em in northern Alaska when all the Sun does is shine and shine."

- via mal contends

Forcing the VA to Follow the Law

Demonstrated anew is the fact that we live in a democracy where a small group of people can lie us into war to devastating consequences [See Iran, Lessons of Iraq, for example]—burning $ trillions and traumatising a generation of American troops.

One consequence of war, we make victims of veterans. Honoring them requires more than waving a flag or slapping a bumpersticker on our cars.

In our country honoring veterans means following the law mandating veterans care.

Putting aside the horror of war victims abroad, those serving in the armed forces come home physically and psychologically mangled, many never to live the same again. The U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) is charged with delivering aid and support. [Pictured above is Gordon Duff, Vietnam War Marine Combat veteran and veterans advocate at Veterans Today.]

Politicians selling war are not faced with the prospect of caring for the 100,000s of newly made victims. They did their damage and leave it to veterans to live their lives. But as new veterans are created, new fictions and lies are called for in the name of political expediency.

Here in Wisconsin, for example, the DVA actually orchestrated criminal proceedings against one Vietnam-era veteran who tenaciously pursued a benefits claim, per the advice of his own Veteran’s Service Officer], just another victim of the DVA benefits denial mill that persists to this day.

One critical step in the project to hide away the damage wrought upon our veterans is to trivialize the plight of millions of veterans from invasions past—the Vietnam War wounded. So, Sally Satel M.D., Resident Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, happily tosses around the lie that only specific classes of veterans truly suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most of the troops came back from service in the Vietnam combat era unscathed because they did not fight in heavy combat, we are told, though most any veteran will tell you it is often the troops essentially waiting to be attacked who suffered the most when they got home. But you veterans from the Vietnam War who think you are suffering, don't worry, you're not; Dr. Satel says so.

The problem for politicians is: Serving our veterans is the law. The process and procedures of the DVA bureaucracy for veterans seeking disability benefits is supposed to be non-adversarial, under the Veterans' Judicial Review Act (1988) and related enabling legislation passed over the last few decades.

The Veterans' Judicial Review Act empowers veterans with the right to special judicial review of decisions involving their benefits under the exclusive authority of VA adjudication procedures. But these procedures can't be just made up out of thin air by DVA bureaucrats; rules have to be promulgated and created per the mandates of the Administrative Procedures Act.

But under the Bush administration—in addition to simply denying disability compensation and needed medical services to veterans [see Veterans For Common Sense et al. v. Peake] in the manner of a particularly mean-spirited health insurance company—the DVA simply made up new procedures intended to deny large-scale benefits to deserving veterans, in defiance of the Administrative Procedures Act and the Veterans' Judicial Review Act.

Now, there is a change in the air in hope that President Obama's administration will change the deny-the-claim culture at the DVA and in the legal arena.

United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Across the nation a few thousand attorneys, veterans and advocates are seeing success in the courts, including in an obscure federal, administrative appellate court, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that most Americans have never heard of.

In two recent decisions, the Court is rectifying what Congress and the federal court system has thus far failed to do: Making the government, specifically the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC) and the DVA, follow the law.

Cushman v. Shinseki (No. 08-7129)

In an August ruling in Cushman v. Shinseki (No. 08-7129), the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit proclaimed that a Marine veteran is entitled to a "fair hearing" in a ruling that has veterans advocates turning their heads.

A fair hearing may seem basic due process but if this ideal is realized in DVA practices, the result for millions of veterans is the halting of the DVA creating new rules and ignoring rules in an attempt to deny veterans' claims seeking benefits.

Now, it's up to Congress and Obama to see the DVA funded and begin investigations into schemes in the DVA to deny veterans their benefits. Investigating former VA General Counsel attorney and VA national Director of Compensation and Pension Services, Renee L. Szybala, and DVA officials receiving hefty performance bonuses while sitting on the boards charged with recommending payments are a beginning. The DVA is still a rats' nest of corruption and careerism.

Military Order of the Purple Heart of the USA, and National Veterans Legal Services Program v. Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2008-7076)

In the Military Order case decided September 10, the federal appellate court rules that the Bush-led DVA's newly illegally created rules, called "Fast Letters," that sought to reverse and decrease large-scale benefits granted to veterans is a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. Reads the Court's opinion:

It is apparent that the (DVA) procedural change that is here challenged affects the veteran’s substantive as well as procedural rights, and is 'a change in existing law or policy which affects individual rights and obligations.' ... It is apparent that the procedure set forth in the Fast Letters does not comport with the governing Regulations, particularly 38 C.F.R. §3.103(c), and was not implemented in compliance with the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. Applying the criteria of 5 U.S.C. §706(A), the new procedure is not in accordance with 'law, rule, or regulation,' and is invalid.

That's the summary of the ruling of the Purple Heart decision. It means some of the rights of American citizens for which our troops are ostensibly fighting have been violated by our government in a scheme to deny veterans deserved benefits.

Mark my words here. Veterans for Common Sense and Paul Sullivan, veterans attorney Bob Walsh, the people at Veterans Today and its allies, and the 1,000s of veterans advocates around the nation who work for peanuts will see this tragedy of dishonoring our veterans turned around.
Despair and inaction are not options. Victory is certain.

- via mal contends

Anti-choice Bushie Pushed VA Death Book Lie

As Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander remains silent, a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet is still the object of right wingers misleading veterans and other Americans it is cast as a "death book."

This lie was begun by anti-abortion George W. Bush staffer, Jim Towey. From Veterans Today:

How did the phony ‘death book’ debate involving Veterans Affairs begin? Simple. Fox News-owned Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Jim Towey, former Bush coordinator of anti-abortion activities and political fixer.

Towey is now president of St. Vincent's College, though he has no experience of any kind as an educator. Further, 80% of the faculty have called for his resignation for falsifying documents. It was Towey, in his WSJ editorial who continually mischaracterized VA attempts to inform patients of choices as an attempt to encourage Gulf War veterans to commit suicide.

The pamphlet itself, Your Life, Your Choices, is far from controversial. In fact it is, if anything, frighteningly conservative and mainstream. The document is exhaustive in its addressing of faith based decision making. Every imaginable attempt was made to see to it that no group, no matter how ‘wingnut’ or extreme, would find anything to complain about. The result was a huge document, though extremely informative, that is too long for anyone to read or at least want to.

Now GOP Aims Lies at Veterans

Hey Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

Because nothing is sacred to the Republican Party, certainly not veterans.

Chris Adams at McClatchy Newspapers reports, "While Republicans are calling a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet a 'death book' that encourages veterans to kill themselves or forgo care, ethicists and legal and medical experts say it's a reasonable attempt to help America's veterans plan for the end of their lives."

Make no mistake, the GOP will tell any lie and dishonor America's 26-million veterans for a chance to stir up its benighted base. Now, they are claiming that the DVA is encouraging veterans to kill themselves.

Does the VFW approve of these lies?

There is seemingly no bottom to the Republican Party's capacity to lie in service to ... who knows what these people think they are doing?

Writes Gordon Duff at Veterans Today:

In a TV appearance where Michael Steele, GOP Chairman and defacto spokesman for the medical industry and Fox News's Chris Wallace fabricated a story citing the Department of Veterans Affairs for creating programs to force veterans to commit suicide. ...

Defending veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs was Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, a watchdog group famed for uncovering VA corruption. Other veterans groups, some whose aging members were terrified by the Fox News story have neither made any significant effort to inform their membership or call the GOP and Fox News to account for this attack on the veterans health care system.

The wild and totally falsified claims made by Steele and Fox News are part of a pattern of deceptive reports intended to bring about an outcry against the government's attempt to guarantee health care for the ever increasing millions of uninsured Americans who are victims of the current economic collapse.

Why a political party and news network with passive complicity from veterans organizations would perpetrate such a massive fraud meant to victimize thousands of aging veterans may seen surprising to some.

Again I ask, Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

Veteran Advocates Hit Service Orgs

America has 26-million veterans comprising a tremendously powerful and effective lobby for veterans' interest after service. Wrong.

Veteran advocates who do the thankless work assisting veterans navigating through an often uncaring [and under the administration of George W. Bush hostile] bureaucracy in the U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) see themselves as sleeping with the enemy as service organization such as the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) are perceived as posing a barrier to reform.

Recently a resident of Sussex, Wisconsin, Thomas Tradewell, was elected VFW National Commander.

Mr. Tradewell said in his acceptance speech in mid-August, "to honor our military heroes is to ensure that our military and our veterans are honored, recognized and cared for … which is the focus of every program we conduct at every level of this great organization."

But many veteran advocates see institutional surrender by the VFW and American Legion to the inaction of bureaucracy and neocon aversion to meeting the responsibility to care for our veterans.

In the words of one veteran advocate harboring contempt for the VFW and American Legion: "It's time to rain on these pricks."

Writes Gordon Duff in Veterans Today:

It's worse, much worse. Not only do they say nothing good, most work openly against veterans who, especially recently, have won huge victories for veterans rights, victories won, not only against an uncaring government but with no support from millions of fellow veterans and the organizations who have rubber stamped every oppressive act, every abuse that has for decades destroyed veterans and their families.

Truth is very simple. For 60 years things have gotten worse for veterans although tens of billions of dollars have bloated Veterans Affairs into the most dysfunctional and oppressive bureaucracy in our entire government. Courts now ‘officially’ find the DVA proven ’troubling’ but nobody seems to know why. We know. Sick veterans know. Veterans who have worked claims thru the system know.

What vets don't know is how the American Legion, VFW and other groups have advised the DVA and Congress, led us, every step of the way, to the total failure and utter disaster we have now. These groups ‘played’ at helping vets but became a home for political extremists or dimwits addicted more grandstanding than the hard work required by informed veterans advocacy. ...

For every failure of the service organizations, most military retiree groups even go further. Some actively oppose funds for veteran medical care and benefits feeling it threatens retiree privileges. On one landmark issue, retiree groups continually oppose use of Space A military flights for disabled veterans and Medal of Honor winners, yet millions of tax payer dollars are spent to subsidize both flights and facilities, terminals, hotels, for retirees to use.

All the game playing, be it retirees against vets, conservatives against liberals, delusional idiots against less delusional idiots or serving military who are systematically instructed by our military to disrespect veterans and their service, makes unity an impossibility.

The industry that breeds ignorance is too powerful and ingrained to convert. Veterans have been too polite and understanding, not only with the public and their leaders who could care less what happens to us but with other veterans whose utter ignorance has left us powerless.

The idea that social organizations with good and decent members operate under a national bureaucracy so less decent than the members themselves, or most of them anyway, that reason itself is challenged.

How do we say, thanks for your service, thanks for the flowers and the motorcycle processions but keep the hell out of politics and please, please dump your leadership, fire your lobbyists and get connected to the real world?

Obama’s Presidency on the Brink

How President Obama reacts to three catastrophes will define his presidency.

And none is the health care crisis, as critical as that is, and as annoying as are the Republican lies about public health care.

The catastrophes are Afghanistan, Goldman Sachs, and Veterans Affairs, none of which show a clear path to an acceptable humanitarian and political resolution.

Afghanistan

“Fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia!’” said Vizzini in The Princess Bride, a brilliant film my girlfriend talked me into watching.

Or as Gregory Feifer puts it in The Great Gamble, The Soviet War in Afghanistan (HarperCollins, 2009), “The Soviet war in Afghanistan again confirmed that no power ever successfully conquered that land … [From] Cyrus the Great [to] Alexander the Great … [to] the British … foreign forces have often moved into Afghanistan with relative ease, they’ve never been able to maintain control.”

Feifer and Vizzini might have added that the difficulties of the invaders paled in comparison to the devastation wreaked upon the invaders’ Afghan victims who after all were slaughtered and maimed on a level surpassing the American imagination.

But as the American death tolls mount, the Obama presidency is in political peril.

Goldman Sachs

As for Goldman Sachs, one need look no further than these two pieces describing the appalling situation that under the political circumstances could make Enron look like nothing more than a mere celebrity scandal by comparison.

Robert Scheer's Government Sachs' Strikes Gold ... Again - Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation's history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and ...

Matt Taibbi's The Great American Bubble Machine - The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) is a disaster made much worse by George W. Bush and the American Enterprise Institute who waved the American flag, lied us into war, and specifically ignored federal administrative law made to protect our veterans, while playing Joe McCarthy to political opponents.

Gordon Duff's To Veterans Affairs Secretary Shensiki: Time to Take the Gloves off - Veterans around the country are waiting for Secretary Eric Shensiki to come to grips with the fact, obvious to all of us in the "real world" that we are in a war. I don't mean Iraq and Afghanistan, I mean here at home. We have many times more veterans than we have serving military and many more people in harms way at the hands of rogue elements of the Department of Veterans Affairs than from any foreign enemy.

For every national veterans care scandal, whether 'Shreddergate' or 'Snoopgate' there is now one every day popping up at one medical center after another. The stories are treated as hundreds of 'isolated incidents.' The big ones, thousands risk death from infection or incompetent treatment get a day of news, hidden behind the endless circus of petty political bickering that has replaced government in America.

Lessons learned in achieving acceptable policy metrics thus far: Listen to the peace movement, the left, and Vietnam War-era veterans!

Fascism as American as Apple Pie

Our Vietnam War Marine veteran friend has another typically fascinating piece out at Veterans Today, Background to Tyranny: Bush Family Terror Ties Decades-Old.

The roots of American authoritarianism are long and deep. From Gordon Duff:

Does the following sound crazy? It's not crazy. Just history that is impolitic to report.

In 1934, the Bush family helped organize a military attack on Washington in order to install a Nazi government. Sound outlandish? It is American history. It is call 'the Business Plot (BBC).'

Conservative 'think tanks' still spend millions to edit this from our history books. Sites are taken off the internet and Wikipedia is still erased, even decades later.

Would two rigged elections, a mysterious 9/11 attack, torture and totalitarian rule be surprising if Americans were allowed to know their own history?

Veterans Scandal in Montana

Update: Here's a jobs program, processing veterans' claims that are pouring in (NYT). Would give veterans the respect they deserve, but I suppose the bureaucrats would rather set veteran against veteran like what the Inspector General is trying to pull off in the Robert Anthon affair out of Fort Atkinson. Just another thought, how about no war?

Here's an appalling, emerging Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) scandal in an agency that one would think ought to operate with the force and discipline of a Vince Lombardi-coached offensive line.

But the flag-waving and faux patriotism that is such a pervasive aspect of our culture does not translate into the DVA helping our 26 million veterans as they deserve.

See the following pieces posted over the weekend about a scandal in our neighbor to the northwest:

- VA 'Quack' Scandal in Montana May Be Worst Yet

- Massive Patient Abuse Fraud,Courageous Vets Stand Against Hospital Cover-up

Vietnam War Veterans Called Bums

Funny how the most effective and most committed veteran advocates have nothing but profane language for those veterans who wrap themselves in the flag and scream Republican and God Bless America.

Take Gordon Duff, a Vietnam War Marine combat veteran and regular contributor to Veterans Today.

What Duff [that's the crazy SOB in photo] lacks in subtlety, he makes up in commitment and candor. From Duff's latest:

Who are these folks we see, festooned in vests and ribbons, all screaming for war against someone? Are they real Vietnam vets, aging holdovers from a disastrous war? Having spent 40 years as a Vietnam veteran, I have a pretty good idea. NO! ...

I served in an elite Marine combat unit that was 100% against the war. Everyone in Vietnam was. Why? We lived like pigs, ate slop out of a can and were killed or blown apart in numbers our current troops could never understand and thankfully will never have to.

Even the guys in the rear were worked to death, many of them. There weren't the tens of thousands of mercenaries and kitchen workers there. It was about filling sandbags and 'burning shitters.'

Everyone was sick or wounded and still in the field. During summer, we looked like skeletons, many covered with sores, some with active malaria (me). ...

Chances are you were angry. Marines called the Corps, "the crotch." When Marines quit complaining, it was a sign morale was down. No, I am not kidding.

Full Metal Jacket gives the feel pretty well. Someone must have actually 'been there.'

I have a couple of friends left. I have many now gone. They are good people, hard working and the same people I trusted with my life long ago. I do their complaining for them as I am the only one who can type. I don't spell so well, went to the wrong colleges, I am afraid. ...

At recent count, the majority of those who served in Vietnam are dead. A few years ago, only a million of the 2.4 million were still alive. Last year the number was 813,000. Death through chemistry and neglect is my diagnosis.

Current troops are told, in training, that we were a pack of bums. For kids serving now who have parents and grandparents who served in Vietnam, I hope they speak up. I would like to see someone ‘talked to’ maybe. How can a kid listen to this kind of crap when his father fought in Vietnam and may have been the reason he chose to serve? What is the military thinking? Oops. I said ‘military’ and ‘thinking’ in the same sentence.

What was I thinking.

The GOP War Against Veterans

Gordon Duff at Veterans Today has a piece on the GOP hostility to veterans.

Duff is a Marine combat veteran and a writer on political and social issues who apparently has had enough.

Wisconsin's jailed veteran, Keith Roberts, get a prominent mention.

Writes Duff:

‘Conservative’ means ‘saving money’ and ‘keeping soldiers as slaves onto death.’ Whether we are talking John McCain or Burr or Graham or two dozen others, these patriotic heroes have done nothing over the years but receive continual support from our favorite veterans groups for gutting military and veterans benefits.

With a series of ‘think tanks’ selling pseudo science, most of them got their feet wet with decades of ‘smoking and lung cancer denial,’ or similar idiocy, the American Enterprise Institute stands out as the lead in the war against American heroes.

Even more maniacal and radical than the Heritiage Foundation, private ‘rubber stamp’ for the schemes of Amway/Blackwater, Coors extremism and Richard Mellon Scaife, private funder for the failed Clinton impeachment, the AEI focuses on destroying veterans.

Their primary tool is a Doctor Sally Satel. Satel is an ‘odd duck’ who believes that secret groups of extremist veterans, when not busy trying to overthrow the government or tap her telephone, plot to destroy the American economy by faking symptoms of PTSD after experiencing combat.