Post Traumatic Sedition

Everyone else will be blogging today about the newly-revealed videos of Junior's Katrina briefings. My only comment is that the ReagaNazis didn't need a video tape to impeach Clinton, but now we have Junior on two videos, lying about using court orders for all wiretaps, and for claiming that no one could've anticipated the breaching of the levees. If a Democratic president committed these crimes, this Congress would be doing NO other business but impeachment. So, again, another instance on to the pile of two-faced-ness that has created hypocrisy-fatigue in the American populace.
No, I want to talk about the new assault by the ReagaNazis on our troops, our vets, those guys and gals in uniform that these asses use up like toilet paper, but won't join in battle (Five-Deferment Dick Cheney, for example.) It's not been enough to reduce death benefits, to reduce VA funding, to send the troops off through multiple deployments with insufficient armor, dirty water and poisonous food (aw, hell, I'm not doing links, look it up!) The lunch room at one of my clients got a new USERRA poster yesterday, and the protections for returning soldiers, especially ones in the Guard and Reserve, are pathetic.
Now, it's an assult on the possibility that these soldiers suffer from mental damage as a result of being in battle, and being treated like this. Yesterday's NY Times sported an opinion from an AEI shill, Sally Satel, who wrote that many of the soldiers claiming post-traumatic-stress syndrome (PTSD) are just baby-boom slackers who see this as financial security. She worked the wards of the VA during the reign of Bush the Elder, but her attitude here reminds me of Patton's walk through tents of the injured in WWII, and abusing soldiers with shell-shock. She uses the fact that some of these soldiers took years, maybe tens of years, before finally showing up for treatment, as evidence that they're probably faking.
How long, how hard, how much time and money, have we spent trying to get soldiers who are psychologically damaged by their service to come forward and ask for help? yet here's this clown, with NO military service, setting up the ReagaNazi excuses to cut back on the financial disaster that is coming from the support America owns our soldiers, even at the current, niggardly levels of the Junior Administration. The $2 trillion estimated total long-term cost of the Invasion of Iraq needs to be cut back to allow more money to flow into crony pockets, and to the ReagaNazi marketing centers, like the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the AEI that Satel shills for.
Not only do these slacker vets need to be cut off, but anyone who sympatizes with them, or thinks Junior's doing a lousy job, needs to be investigated for sedition. Like Laura Berg, a nurse at a VA hospital who wrote a letter to a local paper criticizing the government's Katrina response and VA support. She finally spoke out this morning on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now show. The transcript of the interview might inform the AEI's Satel as to why many vets are having resurgences of shell-shock. Instead, the government is apparently trying to shut Nurse Berg up.
It's what we've come to expect from the chickenhawks and cowards that populate the White House and the rest of the Republican Congress: the vets should suck it up and not ask for help, on the battle field or afterward, and anyone who says otherwise needs to be threatened with arrest.
War on the cheap, and don't ask questions! These people have no shame.