It Will Be Perversely Fascinating

I just posted a part of the UPI story and link on the Dean blog website, urging attention and a statement.

Here's the beedlesquoink week at a glance.

Market reports are weirdly positive. Time for misrepresented reports.
The Bush campaign scores 200% over all others. Businessmen love the bastard. Jobless claims fall through the floor. Who is in charge of these stats? Baseball goes as usual. Money buys what it will buy. The dumb jocks think not. Eberyone, women included, want to be a dumb jock to fit in at work. Bush wins this week, loses next. It's always a fifty fifty game. Best advise, stay three steps ahead.

I do not have a link for this, but did hear it on NPR news Thursday...it was unbelievable, the boys couldn't remember signing anything...they were letters to the editor or some such thing....some commander finally admitted to doing this and will not be reprimanded "because his heart was in the right place"!!! I suppose you could hear this on the NPR.org line.


Other things I have heard, about a woman who was nearly blinded and was living on the streets, with her daughter, because she could not get help...I believe she was from Boston. She had served in Iraq and was injured and could not even get help at the VA. Someone wrote a couple of senators, I think Kennedy was one, and FINALLY was getting some help, a place to live and medical care....

This is a tragedy of the greatest degree. We want to give them 87 billion dollars, and give their people medical care, but the people who won their freedom from Sadaam are being neglected and forgotten even before this conflict is really over. I do not deny that 87 billion dollars may be needed, but we must not forget our soldiers, young men and women who have been sent there to fight.....

I don't imagine much of the 87 mil will go to the Iraqi people. Most of it goes to the middlemen, and we know who they are...

Yes, Tartarin, I actually quite agree with you. I know we need to finish the job there, but are we really known for finishing the job? Look at Afghanistan, we have a mess there and have not really done much to alleviate their miserable conditions.

Cool, guys. Today we hear that the GDP has exploded and the economy is really HEATING up. Now: what does this mean? Let's hear it from anyone with something real to offer: what is the GDP? Does the economy look great from YOUR particular vantage; if so, why? Do you think that cooked books may be involved? (friends of Bush who want his reelection (re?) insured, no matter what, despite the war that isn't a war getting to look more and more like a war that might go on and on and costing us more than we can afford...? I dunno. Where I live folks are still struggling and I live in the easiest city in America to find a job: NYC. Everything is too expensive and getting more. But magically, there's no inflation. Everything just costs more... but that's not the same thing as inflation, er. Nobody is getting a raise, but business men are confident. Could it be that employers are happy that they can control their employees by threatening their job security?

... this is Bush America.

So, anyone know what the GDP is? I'd love a clear explanation of why the economy is simply heating up so much when it looks like the same crap as usual from where I sit? Are stocks slamming? I remember the last time that was happening and there were these funny little lies underneath it. Is someone checking on the usual liars, or are they off the hook til next November? Are there more jobs in the offing? Oh yeah, where? What kind of jobs? Christmas retail? Could this be the usual temporary shite? Xmas hoopla followed by January hangover?

Illuminate me, oh economic wizards, if there are any out there... but be sure you really know whereof ye speak... I'm keeping notes.

Now that you folks have had your self righteous rant--here's what Col David Hackworth says about the troops residing in squalor at Fort Stewart Ga:

The reporter, who got the story only half-right, also created the impression that our commanders and docs at Fort Stewart are flat ignoring battle casualties, especially reservists.

Which is not true.

As I stated several months ago on "The G. Gordon Liddy Show," the medical holding facilities at Stewart are overcrowded - not with wounded-in-action heroes but with sick or malingering soldiers. Mainly reservists and Guard folks who were called to active duty and found not fit to fight.



Yes, the Army Reserve and Guard soldiers' medical-holding living conditions at Stewart are substandard. And it's affirmative that the overworked medics there have not been able to provide the kind of care they'd like. But in the triage process, battle casualties have received top priority; they haven't been shuffled off to some dank corner and ignored.



Like the rest of our Army and Marine Corps, the soldiers at Stewart are being pushed to the limit in every area - especially the docs and grunts. There are just too many troops for the existing docs to service and too many for the post to properly house.



But the bigger picture part of the story that UPI missed and Congress needs to investigate is why thousands of reservists and Guard soldiers have been called up and then found not fit to fight. Why are they still on the Pentagon's costly payroll if they can't do the job?



Then too, this mess wouldn't have exploded across the news media if commanders had been in touch with their troops.

Col Harckworth has been tough on the administration and the military but he tries to be fair.

Percy, could you please post a link, so that we can see which inconvenient parts you have edited out?

Try Hackworths web site-----Soldiers for the truth.

Veterans have been mistreated by every administration, only this one is blatantly lying
about its responsibility toward ill and injured vets.

The first link takes you directly to Veterans for Common Sense. The second link is one of
several found on the Veteran's site. The cartoon, as is so often the case, says it all.

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/

cartoon
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=1231

Looks like another reporter got only half the story right at yet another base. He reported on another colonel who made the mistake of admitting to culpability rather then making it someone else's fault. That liberal-biased reporter was supposed to blame the soldiers for using the benefits they earned and are entitled to.


http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2003/10/30ky/met-4-knox1030-3456.html

Thursday, October 30, 2003
Fort Knox says housing for sick has improved
Some were sleeping in wooden barracks during the summer

By DYLAN T. LOVAN
Associated Press



Officials invited reporters to Fort Knox yesterday to inspect a facility where sick troops are being housed.

Col. Keith Armstrong, garrison commander at Fort Knox, said the post was crowded during the summer and some sick and injured soldiers were forced to stay in outdated wooden barracks.

"At some peak point in the process, did we have soldiers in quarters that we would all determine to be substandard? The answer is yes," Armstrong said. Armstrong said there was an influx of troops and personnel at Fort Knox this summer due to several training programs and the deployment and return of soldiers serving in the Middle East.

"We put soldiers in the best quarters that we had available from the very beginning," Armstrong said. But "there was about a four- to six-month period where we had almost every single World War II wood barracks on this installation occupied."

Reporters toured a dormitory-style facility that houses about 150 medical hold soldiers. Some Army medical staff were moved out of the building to make way for the sick soldiers.

Sgt. Marcel Rice, 31, of Cleveland, Ohio, said he has seen improvements in the care at the hospital. Rice said he has a herniated disc.

"I have seen improvement that the hospital here is trying to make with the process," Rice said.

"Overall, there's not much to complain about."

I knew he left things out.
Intellectual dishonesty is so typical of the far right.

Seems to be more then a little selective editing of excerpts from that column, Perception.

Here's just a few tidbits that seem to have been overlooked. For the complete column, here's the link:

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=35290

Since the commanding general of the 3rd Mech Division was otherwise occupied putting down Saddam, the Fort Stewart post commanding officer should have raised Cain until Fort Stewart was reinforced with enough medics to take care of the sick, lame and lazy, and sufficient money was allocated to either renovate the substandard quarters or relocate the medical holdovers.

Today, sadly, too many of our top brass like Myers are out of touch with the bottom - the root cause of most bad organizations. That's because these above-the-fray commanders aren't leaders; they're well-educated, pass-the-buck managers whose bottom line is to avoid any blame.

I hold that things started falling apart when leaders who walked with their grunts, like Jim Gavin and "Chesty" Puller, were replaced by guys in a hurry. First the eager beavers distanced themselves from the troops by riding horses, then jeeps, then choppers, and now many try to command by laptop rather than shoe leather.

Our demoralized military is going to continue to have Fort Stewart-type problems and worse until our commanders finally realize that the welfare of the Joes and Jills sweating the mud and blood must come first.

The only way the top brass will ever stay in touch with their soldiers' heads and hearts is by getting down and dirty and spending real time with their troops.

We have learned our lessons well from the leftist elitists. "once burned is a lesson learned" :wink:

The problem here is that we have a war (yes, really a war) being called something else (police action?), and decisions being made in that war not based on winnability of the actual war, but rather on the political winnability of a pending election. Bush is between a rock and a hard place, pity him truly for what he has brought on himself. He must stay the course, but he can't a) commit more troops, or b) admit to ignoring the clear warning of his own military about the 'aftermath'. Of course, this is not an aftermath... this is a contiguous thing: we invade and try to hold the ground we took with such apparent ease.

The soldiers, meanwhile, have seen attempts to cut their pay and benefits, and a constant glossing over of the hardships they face because of the bad planning. At this point they are even being blamed for his promotional excesses: the mission accomplished banner was THEIR idea says the commander and chief... The thread is stretched taught here. Bush and Co. are hoping that they can keep the country in a 'support-the-troops' mode through the election... but a failure on his part to actually do that is sure to backfire.

It isn't about 87 million dollars; it isn't about weapons of mass destruction; it isn't about a terror free world. It's all about the Republicans holding on to power gained oddly enough in the last election, soon perhaps to be regained even more oddly.

The world is watching. Will we remain a democracy?

Aw, I dunno, Beedles -- there are plenty more wars to start, pretexts to leak to the media, and kids to send off to distant, dangerous places.

Personally I think that having started two foreign wars and finishing (let alone winning) neither, the last thing he's going to be able to pull of is starting another one.

Stretched thin means just that...

The next war he's going to start will have to be between his faithful followers and all the other Americans... that's called the election, and it promises to get ugly.

I try to be hopeful that he'll lose that war, because then, at last, America will win. However, he and his guys are busy redisticting, installing hackable computer voting systems and buying media with BIG corporate cash. What a war this will be.

You don't think we might have a little terrorist scare on our soil, Beedles?

Of course we might... I just don't think that he's going to be physically/politically able to scare up another foreign dispersement of troops. It will not wash during election season. But there's a good chance something will happen on domestic soil, and he'll get to use all the pent up muscle of the Homeland Security machine. In fact it seems way overdue.

It's all so fffing sad and frustrating...

I think you've got the scenario perfectly, Beedle. You're right -- we've almost forgotten Homeland Security. You think maybe some slushy month like Feb? When people are more likely to be home watching TV, backdrop banners with election hints, commercials touting gas masks?