Discussion for article #223363
The neo-cons have never forgiven him for telling the truth about the number to troops needed in Iraq.
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“…It is not the solution, yet it is a beginning…”
The solution is to shut down the source of the problem – Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex.
The question is will the American Legion be as aggressive and vociferous about a Republican Congress that spends excess taxes on things the military doesn’t want, because VA staffing doesn’t have quite the pork punch to bring in campaign donations?
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Please.
“I think anybody who has that job today is going to fail,” Townsend said. “I don’t think everybody realizes the depth of the problems.”
You know what one source of that unfathomably deep problem is? The GOP. How about you point that out?
So most veteran groups could hold two conflicting thoughts at once: that there was a major problem, and that Shinseki wasn’t the source of it.
Go figure. Too bad so many of our “media elite” and “elected politicians” were incapable of doing the same, and so Shinseki had to be the scapegoat. How dishonorable.
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The American Legion has always leaned right. They didn’t seem to mind when the GOP voted down additional aid to the veterans!!
Democrats and Republicans in the coming months better be careful in their treatment of Shinseki.
Of course the American Legion was attacking Shinseki along with their Republican allies. People seem to forget that the American Legion w as originally founded in 1919 as the American version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, that they were used as strikebreakers and goons throughout the 1920s and 30s, that they were major supporters of McCarthyism in the 50s and the leaders of the opposition to Vietnam vets in the 60s and 70s. I wouldn’t join that organization if they paid me.
If the 40 service-avoiders and the 1 National Embarrassment of the GOP (McCain and the rest of them) want to look at who fucked up the VA, they need look no further than their collective bathroom mirror. When Republicans had the majority in Senate and House in 2003, they voted unanimously (against Democratic votes) to “streamline” the VA - which included such things as shutting down one of the three VA hospitals in Arizona - for “efficiency,” i.e., reductions in funding and staffing. This in the face of their unanimous support of Little Georgie’s invasion of Poland, er, I mean Iraq, which they sold as A Great Crusade For Which There Would Be No Casualties (such being the logic in LooneyWorld, where the grass is blue and the sky is green).
As is usual, when something is fucked up, you need look no further than your nearest Republican office-holder to find the cause.
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The Real VA Scandal may be, the Mainstream Media has been so obsessed with The GOP and their communications shop, Fox News constant drum beat, of phony scandals, like Fast and Furious, IRS and that long dead horse BENGHAZI, that only very few commentators, mostly on MSNBC, even mentioned the back log a the the VA Health system, The alarm Bells have been Going off since 2004 that the VA Health System was unprepared for the 100’s of thousands brought to the system by the Cheney/Bush phony war.
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I’m glad somebody brought that up; I, too, wonder if the real reason the Republicans want General Shinseki’s head is a long-held grudge over his testimony to the Armed Service Committee that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required for postwar Iraq. He was one of the saner heads who did not prevail in the rush to war.