Military issues; everything except war

Last year, we waited more than a hundred days while the President made up his mind whether or not he wanted to win in Afghanistan and provide General McCrystal with the troops he said he needed to win in Afghanistan, Finally, the President decided to give the General half of what he requested as a compromise with his political base – as if victory against terrorism could be possible with a compromise.

General McChrystal is gone now because he happen to complain to a reporter about the support he wasn’t getting. Now, a year later, we’re debating whether we can win in Afghanistan after General McChrystal had already predicted we wouldn’t without giving the support he needed.

Earlier last year the President tried to jam down the throats of service-connected disabled veterans a plan to force those veterans to buy insurance to cover their treatment so the President could afford to provide free healthcare for families making more than $80,000/year who hadn’t served in the military. If not for the Veteran Service Organizations, we’d be paying our premiums right now.

Now, we look at the “Defense” Bill which seems to have everything in it except defense.

What should have been a routine budget bill for the Pentagon is now a political cauldron brimming with proposed policy changes over abortion, gay rights and illegal immigration. Senate Democrats have folded, or attempted to fold, all those issues into a single defense package, leading to accusations that the Senate is needlessly politicizing its annual obligation to fund the military.

As the parties hurl political hand grenades at one another, stuck in the crossfire is the military itself.

Even pop culture figure, Lady Gaga, who until recently I thought was a transvestite, has entered the debate by pleading with college students in Maine to harass their Congress members to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy which allows gays to serve in the military. Really? Maine? If she was interested in having an impact on the discussion, she should have gone to Alabama or Mississippi. No courage in going to Maine.

So i guess these issues that aren’t really related to the defense budget are being added so Democrats can bitch that Republicans don’t support the troops during the election when they vote against the larded bill. But it hardly compares to the votes in Congress over the last ten years in which Democrats really did vote against defense bills in an effort to actually defund the military. Like the four times between 2006 and 2008 the Democrats actually voted specifically to cut off funding for deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So this is what Democrats think of the troops – they are a political football to kick back and forth to achieve their political agenda. Their pitched battles can be compromised. The victories on the battlefield take a backseat to victories at the polls.

See, I learned this decades ago when I was sitting in the Saudi desert waiting for Congress to decide whether I can fight or not…while they used me and my troops to blackmail President GHW Bush into signing a tax hike bill that would defeat him several months later. And, oh, I also figured out that Congress hoped we would lose and die by the thousands so they could use that as ammunition in the election, too.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Congress sucks, Military issues