VETERANS VOTE REPUBLICAN – HUH?

The military tends to vote Republican, both active and veterans over the years have tended to support Republican candidates and one wonders why. Besides sending our troops to war based on lies and miscalculations with out adequate equipment ...echoed by Rumsfeld’s quote “"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." When one looks at the recent record of support for our brave veterans by this Republican administration the issue of support for Republicans by veterans gets more strange.

As the Iraq war grew, the Bush administration successfully sought to cut Veteran health care benefits. The Walter Reed scandal really was just the tip of the ice berg. High placed Bush appointees in the Department of Veteran Affairs deliberately seemed to have misled the American people in their phony numbers to justify the cuts in veteran care programs just as more wounded and needy veterans were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. .

The most recent outrage...sort of giving the CIA chief Tenent the Medal of Freedom for his ‘slam dunk’ comment in misleading the American people into the war or the ‘you’re doing a great job Brownie’ as the New Orleans debacle unfolded, ...we have the recent reports of big bonuses ranging up to $33,000 to Veteran Affairs officials involved in the foul-up now coming to light of a $1 billion shortfall for veterans health care programs. These bonuses were given after the Republican government had become aware of the miscalculations if not lies to justify the Bush administration veterans’ cuts in funding for health care. HUH?.

Investigations by the Congressional Government Accountability office, determine the VA had used misleading accounting to support and reward Bush loyalists. This also justified all those large tax cuts for the super rich on the backs of cut backs in benefits and care for veterans.

“Hundreds of thousands of our veterans remain homeless every day and hundreds of thousands more veterans wait six months or more for VA disability claims decisions,’ said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. “The lavish amounts of VA bonus cash would better spent on a robust plan to cut VA red tape.” HUH? Voting Republican by the military...one has to wonder whether military intelligence is indeed a contradiction in terms.