The sad truth is that this president, this vice-president, and this administration have never given a damn for the soldiers they’ve condemned to lives filled with agony, when they aren’t lives simply cut short in the flower of their youth. (And let’s not even get started on their lack of concern for the infinitely greater number of Iraqi lives shattered by their sporting adventure.) These soldiers are tools to be used for a purpose. They might as well be wrenches or rifles. Their purpose is to win glory and the spoils of war for Bush and Cheney and ExxonMobil.
They have another purpose, as well. These soldiers – these presidential tools – serve as props for Bush administration photo-op propaganda efforts. But only if they’re new and shiny and whole, of course. Rove and his minions regularly make sure that the wounded ones – the amputees, the burned, scarred and mangled, the ones with caved-in crania and permanently melted faces – that these are kept to the side, out of the photo with the smiling, caring, commander-in-chief. And you can bet there won’t be any cockroach-infested rooms or three-day old soiled hospital sheets in the pictures either.
You have to wonder what happened in somebody’s childhood to make them so heartless that they could launch a war like this, based on utter and complete lies, leave the wrecked bodies who come back from it in dumping stations like Walter Reed, stall on providing them even the minimal benefits to which they’re entitled, and then have the audacity to pull the wounded out of presidential photo sessions.
I’m sorry George, Dick, Karl, if your mother was cold or your father distant. I truly am. But this has to stop. As you are so fond of reminding us, it’s all about personal responsibility. Isn’t it still? Regardless of personal circumstances, right? Doesn’t that apply equally to sanctimonious keepers of the public morality as well as to the poor SOBs whom you love to strap onto death chamber gurneys? (And they are, in fact, always poor, and always the product of far more damaging childhoods than you could imagine.) Doesn’t it apply to you Deciders whose decisions have terminated nearly a million lives in Iraq, and brought untold misery to millions more?
So when will you guys take responsibility for what you’ve done? When will you attend a military funeral? When will you simply knock some freakin’ heads together inside the administration which you fully control to fix the medical system for wounded vets, rather than appointing yet another jive Washington commission, with all the same crowd of jive Washington commissioners, to “look into it” and report back a year later with some anemic recommendations that you’ll ignore anyhow? When will you add money to the budget to provide adequate care for these folks you call heros, rather than stealing it from them in order to stuff the pockets of another crony contractor? When will you risk instituting a draft in order to put enough soldiers on the ground such that you don’t drive into the ground the few soldiers that you keep sending back and back and back?
When will you, in short, live up to your own revoltingly cynical rhetoric and start truly supporting the troops, rather than hiding behind them?
When, indeed.
On the eve of his illegal and completely unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state, the honor midget known as George Bush had this to say: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services: If war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.”
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