Veterans...We should be Ashamed!

Update 2/20 at 10a EST. If you are interested in following this sad story then you should be following it on AmericaBlog which is all over it. Full time blogging has a great advantage over us part timers when a story is developing like this.


I had all intents of spending a nice quiet evening surfing around the WWW and reading blogs and commenting...you know having fun butting in and adding my two cents to various and sundry things. It was going well until I stopped by Shakespeare's Sister and followed the link to the Washington Post story about Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

I knew in the back of my mind somewhere that this was the case but evidently I had been suppressing it. There is enough bad stuff going on that people who wish to remain apparently sane have to ignore or pretend to ignore at least some of it. I am in that category.

I knew things were not a bed of roses for the 23,000 or so American soldiers that Bush and company have run through the meat grinder for shits and giggles over the last five years or so. I knew things were sub-optimal because Bush told me there were great....better everyday.

This story brought home all the fears and frustration I have been holding back on this front for some time. It's bad enough that we are sending these young people into Iraq for no other purpose than to realize the greed driven dream of the neocons to control all of the oil in the Middle East but to basically abandon them after their sacrifice raises the level of this tragedy to hitherto unbelievable heights. I can't get a complete emotional handle on this but I know that it is going to affect me in ways I don't yet know and understand.

There is absolutely no excuse for this, none. It is just another example of the incompetent administration that merrily went to war with no plan to deal with the aftermath in Iraq, Afghanistan or at home. It is a reality too hard to bear that 96% of these poor souls were injured after "Mission Accomplished". Yet here we are with no end in sight and the foolish man who believes himself the "war president" making statements like this;

"We owe them all we can give them," Bush said during his last visit, a few days before Christmas. "Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service."

You know he knows that this is the reality of his war but somehow he has convinced himself and a large part of the country that this is a justifiable cost of war. That it is OK to shortchange these men and women after they have made lifelong sacrifices in his stupid and senseless war. How wrong can a man be? We can never make up for what our government has done to these brave men and women and continues to do but we sure as hell should be trying out best to correct it.