To me it looks like the Republicans have declared war on our soldiers.

[Veggie Meathead]

If you look at the record since the Iraq war broke out last year,you will see why that is the right conclusion to draw:

1.First, rumsfeld says that the soldiers do not contribute anything
of value to the war.
2.The soldiers are sent in without proper armor or protective vests.
3.They are kept in Iraq long past the day when their tour of duty is
supposedly over.
4.When they come back in a casket,nobody is present to pay their respects.The Press is deliberately excluded so Rumsfeld and his boss
would not be "embarrassed" by the dead.
5.The wounded are not even acknowldged and when they rturn,their benefits get cut back.
6.When a soldier gets a purple heart, it is mocked by the yahoos
with the purple heart bandaids.

7.The soldiers are forced to disobey the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners opening them up to war crimes charges while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush plan their escape hatches.

This sickening list is by no means complete.It lends proof to what Bush Sr. is reported to have said about our soldiers in another context:"fodder".

[Jo March]

1. Beautifully done, Veggie

You have summed it up in seven sentences. Why does our press miss that?

Bush & Co. have "star-spangled eyes" and are perfectly willing to send the poor and unimportant off to war. They don't care for them before they send them or after they return.

[klook]

2. Good (but depressing) list

Don't forget about the reservists and National Guard folks who've ended up with their butts thrust into combat so they can be crusaders for the Bush oil team.

[rkc3]

3. And the back door draft that keeps Reservists from staying home.

[Veggie Meathead]

4. What burns me up the most is that none of these chickenhawks

have the time to visit the wounded at Walter Reed.What a contrast with our best generals,Patton and Eisenhower!

[GOPEC]

5. new cartoon along these lines...

http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/shockwave/pigeonhawks.htm

[Veggie Meathead]

6. Great summing up of my thoughts. In another thread here at DU,

it says that young Republicans support Bush's war but are not willing to go fight there .That makes me wonder why we don't rename the Republican Party, the Chickenhawk Training Party.On second thought, because being a Chickenhawk is a congenital Republican affliction,may be they don't even need to be trained for it.Comes naturally with the birt certificate.

[Kanary]

7. PLEASE don't forget the benefits that have been gutted, slashed, and

burned!

A very little work on your wording, and this would make a brilliant LTTE! Go for it!

Kanary

[Veggie Meathead]

8. Thanks.I will add your item about the benefits being slashed

and send it to the NYT.Before that I will post for all of your comments.I am mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!

[Kanary]

9. I'm glad you'll send it to the NYT!! Let us know the results.

The form of it is great for a LTTE -- easy to read, brief and to the point. Just a bit of polishing, and it's perfet.

It should get a number of vets to join you in your mad! :hi:

Kanary

[Karenina]

16. They are also targeted

for insurance fraud and credit card scams.

Went digging in the garage and found this:

Ordered Into Debt
Pentagon Brass Force Credit Debt On Soldiers and Sailors

Geoffrey Gray


The numbers were staggering: $3,400 for a sumo-wrestling outfit, $16,000 for a corporate golf membership, $38,000 in cash advances for lap dances. All were part of a $101 million shopping spree made with "government purchase cards," the U.S. military's version of corporate credit cards -- another made-for-media scandal of reckless Defense Department spending.

But throughout congressional hearings on the topic in July, the real scandal with the military's other piece of plastic, the Government Travel Card (GTC), went ignored by the mainstream press, despite the fact that the card has plunged thousands of ordinary servicemen and servicewomen into debt so deep that the Pentagon is busy garnishing the wages of its own soldiers. And the only military commander known to raise hell about the scheme -- a lone Air Force colonel based in the Midwest -- says that blowing the whistle on the GTC ruined her career.

Lower in the ranks, the damage has been considerable. U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have found themselves stranded in the desert without a dime because their credit was suddenly cut off, according to a May 29 report in the Military Times, leaving families behind in a nasty catch-22: Swallow the debt, or borrow more money to pay the bills so their credit wouldn't be ruined.

Concocted by Congress in 1998, the GTC was designed to privatize the accounting of federal travel expenses and touted to save taxpayer money. (It also reaps huge fees by the financial conglomerates that issue the cards.) It works like this: Servicepeople are ordered to apply for personal GTCs -- interest-free credit cards issued exclusively by the Bank of America. Instead of requesting vouchers or getting cash to pay for travel expenses, servicepeople pay up front with the their own GTC cards -- essentially floating interest-free loans to the government. As a result, they have to submit expense reports and wait for reimbursements.

<snip>

"It's a pathetic situation when soldiers are forced to buy into a system that's likely to screw them personally," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, a D.C. nonprofit watchdog group. "This is just another example where the Pentagon has conjured up a scam with a favorite contractor. The desperate rush to privatization has a million warts."

Published: Aug 21 2002
Geoffrey Gray is a writer based in New York City. His work has been published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Village Voice.


This article originally appeared in The Village Voice. I found it on Tompaine.com but this was back before I'd figured out the deal with links. :freak:

[BrotherBuzz]

10. clarification

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that draftees added "no value, no advantage, really, to the United States Armed Services over any sustained period of time."

[Veggie Meathead]

11. Thanks.I was looking for the exact wording.I was trying to convey

whether draftees or career soldiers, he belittled their sacrifice.

[Disturbed]

12. Welfare

How many soldier's families are on Welfare, depend on Food Stamps?

The deplorable conditions of many hospitals.

The Neo Fascists treat soldiers like they want to treat the rest of Amerika's citizens, like serfs.

Most Repubs are HYPOCRITES!!!! The bandaid Purple Heart crap is the real indicator of the Rethug attitude.

[Veggie Meathead]

13. whether it is the soldiers or the firemen or the police who died saving

others at the WTC, they are all props for Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld on their way to world domination.They are going to have more and more of us to look down on if their programs for the deliberate impoverishemnt of our middle class succeed.

[Karenina]

17. Kicking in case Veggie can use more input.

:kick:

[BrotherBuzz]

14. No, he belittled the draftee!

I was one of those dumb draftees and his statement cut to the bone, it hurt me in many ways. Because I didn't fit into the mold and couldn't play the game (college, teacher, married...anal cyst) I was sucked into the intake. Jeez, I'm still very angry....without choices?

Agent Mike: I will keep my promise about what we talked about, but I still think you're wrong. ;)


Rumsfeld's full quote

"If you think back to when we had the draft, people were brought in . . . without choices," Rumsfeld said. "Big categories were exempted: people who were in college, people who were teaching, people who were married. . . . And what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services over any sustained period of time because the churning that took place, it took an enormous amount of effort in terms of training, and then they were gone."

[AmyDeLune]

15. Rumsfeld's Quote...

I see, so he's saying that all the really smart people were able to dodge the draft, leaving only the dumb dregs of society to waste time and resources training so that they could get shipped off and killed. How sweet!(sarcasm)

I think he and Shrub'ya should be awarded "yellow heart" bandages for their valiant efforts in service-evasion.

[Karenina]

18. Adding more insult to injury...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x736983