I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a Vietnam era veteran. The desperate last-minute tactics that the Bush administration and their party shills and media whores have been using today are beyond reprehension. We can only hope that every active duty serviceman (and woman) has been paying attention as the day wore on.
Not that I'm not already completely and thoroughly disgusted with this crew - but that they hype their bravado and engage in faux "support the troops" sloganeering, when exactly the opposite is true, makes my veteran blood boil.
The men and women of America's armed forces continue to be used as pawns in the Bush administration's royal power play. Perhaps that's because so few of the chickenhawks actually served, and never experienced a sucking chest wound on a battlefield. I hear from reliable sources that such an experience changes a person.
Here's a couple of examples of overt disrespect for those in the armed forces, ripped from today's GOP headlines:
Rudy Giuliani:
The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?
BushCo CGI plants phony GI's in ad:
INDIANOLA, Iowa - President D'Esperation's campaign acknowledged Thursday that it had doctored a photograph used in a television commercial to remove the president and the podium where he was standing. The campaign said the ad will be re-edited and reshipped to TV stations.
A group of soldiers in the crowd was electronically copied to fill in the space where the president and the podium had been, aides say...
And finally, from my new best friend, Josh Marshall:
Back on December 6th of last year, you’ll remember, the Washington Post reported that in 2004, four of ten Army divisions would not be combat ready for up to six months. Specifically, they would be rated at C-3 or C-4, the Army’s two lowest readiness levels.I could rant all night. The examples of the Bush Administration flat out disrespecting our troops overseas (and their families back home) is fast becoming the stuff of military legend.
Since then, Army internal reporting and a classified Government Accounting Office study of the combat readiness of all US ground forces have further underscored the problem. The Secretary of the Army and others were briefed on the GAO study, which is still under review, earlier this month. Senior uniformed Army officials are, of course, also receiving regular briefings on the situation.
The picture this reporting paints for Guard readiness is, I’m told, considerably more bleak than the December news about readiness in the Army...
Someone on another blog or online forum brought up a really good point - maybe the dissin' of the troops in the past few days is the reason why access to the georgewbush.com site has been cybertastically embargoed outside the borders of the U.S. It would be interesting to read how much internet access GI's in Iraq are getting these days. It's also rather curious why BushCo is not already making a big stink about overseas military ballots yet. Hmmm. Perhaps the word is getting around to the men and women in uniform, and their families.
Ya think?
