Veterans: Republicans are not your friends..

Wouldn’t you know that Bachmann and company would take advantage of veterans trying to visit a WWII memorial yesterday. How craven are these people? Well, after shutting down the government, these idiots helped these folks break in to the monument, blaming the President for its closure. They’re what I like to call, wrong.

I’ve been married to a disabled veteran for 34 years. In the early years, the VA couldn’t seem to figure out that his wife and children (me and our boys) qualified for health care benefits. It eventually got straightened out, but our first child was paid for with insurance from a job, and our second child was paid for monthly because we had no insurance. We sold our truck to pay the last $400 we owed. Both were c-sections so this was expensive. It’s so much easier these days to get somewhere with them, but we’re in the system now. For new veterans and their families, this government shutdown only makes new claims take longer and in view of the existing backlog, to affect these folks this way is criminal. To blame the President is ridiculous.

When the Bush administration lied the country into war with Iraq, Rummy said, you go to war with the military you have, not the military you want. It would have been nice to go to war with the administration we elected too..you know the Gore administration. But then I wonder if Al Gore would have ever taken us into war with Iraq. Something tells me had he actually be allowed to serve as President, we’d be in a much different place now. Instead, George Bush sent our troops into harms way without body armor. I even remember reading that parents were being asked to send stuff to their family members serving that the government should have been providing. I had no problem going into Afghanistan, although I think it should have been a Special Forces deal. We never needed to engage in either place the way that we did. Remember who did this. Remember who sent your children to die without protection. 

Remember that it’s the Tea Party Republicans along with their actual Republican counterparts who have advanced the war on women, children, seniors, poor people, you name it. Don’t cheer when they use you to put the blame for their own shenanigans on the President. Because that’s what they’re doing..using veterans to promote their lie. Don’t allow yourselves to be manipulated by these people. They couldn’t care less about you. You were a means to an end for them. They don’t understand the sacrifice you made for all of us. If they did, they would have never let this shutdown happen. Even for no other reason, couldn’t they have thought about all the new veterans trying to get their disability claims processed? What about all the vets and active military personnel on food stamps? What about all the vets who are homeless? If we had never gone into Iraq, we wouldn’t have this backlog, and oh my goodness..maybe family members would be alive and intact instead of what people are coping with now.

And what does the Tea Party do? They say thank you to veterans and active duty military personnel by shutting down the government just so that we don’t have the Affordable Care Act. They hold us hostage. They hold you hostage. Of course the ACA went into effect yesterday anyway. All of this is for nothing. But its effect will be long lasting.

When you go to war, you never do this lightly. These wars may make a bunch of Bush’s cronies lots of money, but it’s destroyed so many lives. And when a small faction of people can destroy the country further because they have no clue how to properly govern, instead punishing the country with their radical ideology, we all need to stand up against them. What we don’t do is cheer them on when they act like idiots.

Understand who the enemy is because they are among us.