Jon Soltz folds to MoveOn pressure

In Politico this morning, Chris Frates ruminates over the cross-dressing nature of the various “activist groups” in Washington these days. Basically, since these organizations helped to get President Obama and the Democrat Congress elected, they’re reticent about criticizing their beneficiaries. I mean, Code Pink was all about ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama hasn’t changed from the Bush policy, and you hear nothing from them on that much anymore.

Vote Vets’ former motor officer who fought his portion of the Iraq War from Kuwait Jon Soltz was featured in the article trying to weakly explain why veterans should be concerned about labor, environmental and energy policy;

Labor law and climate change don’t immediately strike most folks as veterans’ issues, but VoteVets has found an angle.

The group’s chairman, Jon Soltz, said the energy bill is relevant because it would help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and keep U.S. troops out of Iraq and other oil-producing countries.

Playing on more issues appeals to VoteVets because it keeps it in the bigger debates and offers a chance to expand its donor base.

But it’s not abandoning its core constituency.

Soltz said his group will also be getting more involved in the torture debate and will monitor the phasing out of the Iraq war and its effect on veterans.

“To continue to stay relevant, you have to … find where your organization can make a difference,” Soltz said.

Relevance. That’s not usually a word I’d associate with Vote Vets. In fact, the other day TSO discovered that Vote Vets and IAVA combined get less daily traffic on their web presence than This Ain’t Hell – a private blog on Yahoo servers that gets virtually no money that doesn’t come out of my pocket (because you cheap skates won’t even click the stupid Google ads). We don’t have Wesley Clark and Keith Olbermann stumping for us – although that may be to our advantage. It’s not that our traffic is so high – it’s that theirs is so low.

Soltz forgot to mention that he really doesn’t have control over the direction his organization takes. He takes his marching orders from MoveOn.org which takes it’s orders from the DNC. That’s why John Bruhn left Vote Vets two years ago – they are too partisan.

Yeah, Soltz is making a stretch. He’s not trying to keep Vote Vets relevant in the veteran community, he’s trying to keep it relevant in the MoveOn community. Veterans don’t care about environmental, labor and energy policy to the extent that Soltz tries to make it seem – otherwise we wouldn’t have Soltz trying to explain to us why we should care. Remember in the article that Soltz wrote yesterday about former Vice President Cheney also included an explanation about why veterans should care about the Democrat witch hunt in Congress.

We veterans know what our concerns are, we don’t need someone to tell us what we should care about – we need someone who’ll represent our concerns.

Notice how everyone we criticize usually shows up here to explain themselves? Ever seen any of the Vote Vets weasels do that? Nope, because they’re so intellectually shallow, their positions won’t stand up under the slightest bit of scrutiny – and they know it.

Vote Vets is too concerned about the past administration than the future of veterans – because their MoveOn masters have told them that’s how it’s going to be.

Category: Liberals suck, Usual Suspects