Once agains the so-called Compassionate super-patriotic Republicans and their Uberconservative base revert over and over again to their mean spirited tight-fisted miserly anti-government anti-Obama roots when it comes to spending money on 9/11 victims or US veterans of the Gulf War or of the Iraq-Afghan War.
The Tea Party loons and Uber conservative super-patriots have a bad habit of believing whatever the GOP tells them .
We have seen this over again all through the Bush/Cheney era during which salaries of U.S. soldiers were reduced or frozen while their benefits were reduced.
For instance soldiers were promised a signing bonus which they would receive at the end of their deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan yet many soldiers were denied their bonuses when they did not finish their tour of duty because they had been wounded or for psychological reasons ie PTSD were unable to continue their tour in the battlefield.
And worse these bonuses were denied to spouses or surviving family members even when a soldier was killed in battle and therefore in legal terms had not finished his or her tour of duty.
We also know that under the Bush regime PTSD was treated not as a legitimate health concern but as cowardice, shiftlessness, laziness etc.
We know that head injuries were also ignored by the VA under instructions from the White House under Bush/Cheney.
We also saw during the Bush/Cheney years communities holding bake sales to get money to pay for suitable armor for those in their community fighting in Iraq.
Over and over again the Military brass, the Pentagon and the White House failed to provide needed equipment for the toops.
Troops in the field were provided for instance with inadequate and unsafe water from privately constructed water and sewage treatment facilities.
Instead those who built these substandard facilities were rewarded for their ineptness with even larger contracts from the Pentagon and U.S. government.
GOP refuses to give any financial assistance to the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y), whose constituents include many directly affected by this legislation, wasn’t especially impressed with the Republican argument
Anthony Weiner Rips Apart Republicans on 9/11Health Bill
The GOP, Bushites & Neocons support for 9/11 victims just a matter of Public Relations and lip service lacking any substantive especially finnacial support for 9/11 victims
'Party of No’ Says ‘No’ to Victims of 9/11 by Steve Benen Via Alternet.org July 30, 2010
...it appears Republican reverence for all things related to the 9/11 attacks is officially over.
Congress turned thumbs down on the Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act on Thursday night, raising doubts it will ever pass.
Most Republicans refused to back the measure, calling it a “slush fund,” and saying it was another example of Democratic overreach and an “insatiable” appetite for taxpayers’ money.
The bill would spend $3.2 billion on health care over the next 10 years for people sickened from their exposure to the toxic smoke and debris of the shattered World Trade Center. It would spend another $4.2 billion to compensate victims over that span, and make another $4.2 billion in compensation available for the next 11 years.
So, as Republicans see it, we can afford tax breaks for billionaires. But care for 9/11 victims, not so much.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), perhaps best known for his apology to BP after the company’s oil spill, “said the rest of the country should not bear the brunt of helping New Yorkers cope with the aftermath of the terror attacks.” [Update: To clarify, this is a paraphrase from the New York Daily News, not a direct quote of Barton.]
How could House Republicans kill the bill in a majority-rule chamber? As it turns out, Dems brought the measure to the floor as a “suspension bill,” because they didn’t want the GOP to try to gut the legislation with poison-pill amendments. But this strategy meant the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The final vote was 255 to 159 — far short of the two-thirds threshold — with 155 Republicans in opposition, many of them saying they would consider supporting the bill, but only if the GOP were allowed to push unrelated amendments intended to embarrass the majority.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y), whose constituents include many directly affected by this legislation, wasn’t especially impressed with the Republican argument:
So much for Support The Troops -Bushites, neocons & GOP
Neocons & Pro-Republican Pro-Bush/Cheney Cabal ignoring policy changes initiated by the current Obama administration.
Administration concerned that department of Veteran Affairs has gone rogue and has its own agenda which is also at odds with the needs of US veterans.
Witness: 'Cabal' at VA Is Killing Veterans At a hearing last week, experts told Congress that VA staff was “intentionally delaying research and treatment for our veterans.” by Nora Eisenberg via AlterNet.org July 31,2010
Despite the recently announced intention by Secretary Eric Shinseki and his Chief of Staff, John Gingrich, to change the “culture” of VA, the agency is in the grips of a rogue bureaucracy that bypasses congressional oversight and sabotages veterans interests and health. This was the claim made by several speakers at last Tuesday's hearing of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to consider Gulf War illness and "Dissatisfied Veterans." Some 250,000 veterans of Desert Storm are disabled from the a multi-symptom, multi-system sickness associated with exposure to toxins during deployment. service. According to Paul Sullivan, Executive Director of the veterans advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, “a cabal of VA staff” is “intentionally delaying research and treatment for our veterans.”
Anthony Hardie, another Gulf War veteran and advocate, testified that VA bureaucrats “simply disregard the oversight ...created specifically” by Congress to bypass the entrenched bureaucracy in VA and the Department of Defense, which are “at the root” of many of the problems facing Gulf War veterans. While Hardie said that bureaucratic end-runs of both congress and agency programs might be be a matter of old-timers resisting new ways, he did not rule out less benign explanations including officials “having their own agenda.” and undermining reform because of “wanting this Administration to fail.”
As a member of the Congressionally-mandated Research Advisory Committee (RAC), Hardie said he was surprised and disappointed by recent VA actions taken without appropriate consultation with RAC and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee charged with Gulf War research advisement. Last week, Hardie learned only from a press release published on a veterans advocacy site that VA would be funding specific research programs. The projects, budgeted for a meager $2.8 million, pursued discredited approaches to Gulf War illness, promoting psychological causes and psychological remedies, even as both RAC and IOM have reported that VA and DOD's long-held stress theory of GWI is unfounded and that compelling data link the disease to toxic exposure. Moreover, Hardie said, the VA press release promulgated misinformation, claiming that "almost a quarter" of GW veterans suffer from Gulf War illness, when the IOM committee that works at their direction, has clearly stated that 35.9% or over a third of Gulf War veterans suffer from the multisymptom, multisystem disease.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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