Washblog

For Immediate Release, Tuesday, February 20, 2007(Washington, D.C.) - Today, U.S. Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, urging him to launch an Inspector General's investigation of the deplorable living conditions facing returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at the Army's flagship military hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Isn't that nice?

The treatment of our injured returning Iraq veterans by the citizens of the United States of America is absolutely and unequivocally a profound embarrassment.  

Never mind that we are not individually guilty of direct behavioral mistreatment of this precious American blood. Most of us don't spit on our soldiers, give them the finger or call them war criminals. But civically speaking, we're as guilty as if we had.

Those annointed to take care of our returning veterans  vicariously for each of us - doing for us what we presumably would do if we were there greeting and treating each veteran in person - have shamed us.

Photo from  washingtonpost.com

Photos: The Wounded and Walter Reed Five and a half years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre Walter Reed Army Medical Center into a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients.

I don't want to hear about the fact that staff at Walter Reed and the VA are overworked, not totally responsible and not the real culprits.

I know that and you know that. But we just don't ho-hum and walk away from a house fire because the tenants did not start the fire.

We put the damn thing out immediately - any way we can. And we don't care if the G-D landlord doesn't like it or not. He's hurting our national community. We'll put out the fire as quick as we can, then we'll go take it up with the landlord and make him pay.

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As soon as I heard this story, I looked up our two Senators to see ever either or both served on Senate committees connected to veterans. I found and I read ... and remembered when Patty was pulling out all stops in her campaign against Nethercut.

I remember Patty and an array of Democratic Senators including those who consider themselves presidential material all talking the talk but walking the slow walk when it comes to applying a compress to our national bleeding.  

Democrat or Republican, I don't care who, but DON'T send a staffer down to Walter Reed to eyeball anything ... go down there YOURSELF - right now!

And don't insult our sense of urgency any further.  Now is not the time to listen to Democratic Committee chairpersons and senior members blab about sending staffers out to inspect the damage so they can propose legislation to "prevent such a thing from happening again."

What a crock .... what a cliche .... what a political philosophy that even now transparently reveals an inability to take a firm stand. That's why troops are still over there in harms way, living, surviving, dying or returning half of what they were when they left. Nobody took a firm stand and everybody pretended that it is a wise thing to  support keeping the troops there "cause we broke it and own it."

Nonsense ... we broke it when Iraqis didn't want us to break it. We keep trying to super glue the pieces back together and breaking more Iraqi things in the process.

They just want us to leave.

We need to leave.

But like a mean and clumsy drunk trying to make things right while still drunk, we're only making it worse.

And don't let any Senator, Representative or PR hack tell you otherwise.

In recent years Republican senators and representatives and a few irresponsible Lieberman Democrats have shamed every American citizen regarding the War, the Surge and really truly caring about what happens to our Active Service and Veteran soldiers.

Remember in Planet of the Apes when the gorillas in charge have Charlton Heston in a cage and are hosing the hell out of him.

He shouts, "IT'S A MADHOUSE!"

Well, welcome to our flight over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Note how currently Senator McCain has become a national Veteran embarrassment, shamefully toadying to the religious right and attempting to say whatever it takes to get the lame-duck republican machine behind his efforts to take Dubya's place.

Note how there is no high-falutin foreign policy or statesmanlike-wisdom that justifies the nation's amateur strategists' continually pouring American bodies into the meat grinder that has become the worst American foreign policy and military blunder in history.

Note that Democracy Now interviewed the Iraqi who leaked the Oil Plan and that interview is worth reading or listening to so you can hear a knowledgeable Iraqi confirm our worst fears about losing loved ones over oil.

Note that Stan Goff wrote two blazing op-ed a few weeks ago about that surge and what is behind it.

Note that today Condoleeza Rice sounded like a first-year-out-of-diplomacy-graduate-school debutante giving an incredibly light-weight performance as she closed out her Israel visit with meaningless Republican foreign policy blather.

Note that a Federal appeals court re-affirmed last year's traitorous Republican legislation denying habeas corpus.

Note that Dick Cheney is in Japan presumably acting on behalf of America's foreign policy interests and soldiers, trying to drum up more foreign troops into Iraq. But he isn't going to talk to the Japan Foreign Minister who called the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq a mistake.

Note how those who got us into this mess are absolutely diplomatic, political and governing amateurs; absolutely nuts and in immediate need of neutering.

Is there ANYBODY responsible holding the reins of government in any branch?

Would someone please step forward - and if you can do nothing more - piss on the flames?