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« First thing in th e morning... | Main | Tri Lamb, baby! »
Shortchanging Soldiers
May 2, 2006
The preamble to this article makes a connection I hadn't considered in all of this staff shuffling and reorganizing. I did not realize the dissolution of FEMA was to result in a pentagon-led disaster preparedness model. That alone gave me pause this morning, before I even got to the meat of this article, which once again lays out the horrifying extent to which we are NOT taking care of active and veteran soldiers.
The Veterans Administration, now run by a former Republican National Committeeman, has been subjected to the same radical hatcheting that the White House has tried to wield against the rest of America's safety net. Cutbacks, cooking the books, privatization schemes, even a proposal to close down the VA's operations have all been in evidence. The administration's inside-the-beltway supporters like the Heritage Foundation and famed anti-tax radical Grover Norquist like to equate VA care with welfare. Traditionally, however, most Americans have held that the VA's medical care and disability compensation was earned by those who served their country.Unfortunately, in our draft-free country, the fight to protect the Veteran's Administration and to fully fund it has gone on largely out of public sight. Other than the Washington Post and the Associated Press, relatively few journalistic organizations have bothered to regularly cover the VA. The fight over it that White House hatchetmen, VA political appointees, and their allies in Congress have had with Congressional critics (Democratic and Republican) along with veterans' organizations has been monitored closely only by veterans' websites like Larry Scott's VAWatchdog.org, veteransforcommonsense.org and military.com.
Go read the whole thing. Even if you have heard it all before, it bears repeating and repeating and rehashing and repeating until we finally get it through our heads that a) War is not psychologically healthy for our nation and b) War is not fiscally healthy for our nation. Point a being, of course, being the most important.
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Comments
I know I should go read it, but honestly I'm not sure I have the stomach for it at the moment...