“Where have you been?”
According to the Washington Post, during yesterday’s hearings about the Walter Reed dust-up;
“I have to tell you, the first thing that pops into my mind is: Where’ve you been? Where has all the brass been?” said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), who convened the hearing as chairman of the national security and foreign affairs subcommittee. “All the things that [were] heard, read about and heard earlier today, clearly, this can’t all be pushed down at the lower level. Clearly this is not some junior officer’s responsibility that nobody else has to claim anything for.”
I’d ask Mr Tierney the same question. When this war began, supposedly back when the Democrats still supported the President, I made rounds to the wounded soldiers in some of the wards. The nephew of a high school friend had been in that Chinook crash right before Thanksgiving of 2003 when about 60 troops were killed. He miraculously survived but lost part of one of his legs. Well, anyway, I smuggled him in a bottle of Saranac Black and Tan, a local brew from back home, and his wife came over to our apartment a few times and fixed him a couple of homecooked meals to take to the hospital.
While I was up there, I talked to some of the troops (one of my favorite past times) and none of them had been visited by their Congressional reps, so I started taking down their names and hometowns and faxing the information to Congressional offices.
After awhile, it got too overwhelming because idiot staffers would call me at work and ask stupid questions about how they could verify that the information I sent them was true, doctors names and phone numbers – all the stuff they could find out with a simple call to the Walter Reed PAO. Besides, I’d influenced enough people to get them pro-active on visiting their constituents.
The thing that really got me out of the business, though, was when I told a staffer who had waited five days to call me and ask about a young troop that the hero had died. He was a great kid with a lovely young wife whom I’d met on Thanksgiving when I was passing out pogie bait. It broke my heart that he’d died. Just thinking about his wife and their new baby, I just lost it on the phone with the tardy staffer. So I stopped doing it for completely selfish reasons.
So where these pompous, arrogant congressmen all of this time? If they’d been REALLY worried about their constituents, they’d have already known about conditions in Building 18. They shouldn’t have had to wait to read it in the Post.Â
UPDATE: Bob Dole and Donna Shalala have been chosen to head a presidential commission on veterans’ health care. Bob Dole I understand – he’s spent years in the vet health system. But what the hell is Shalala doing there. Other than teach at college, all she’s ever been is a shill for Clinton Administration. I guess she’ll play the Jamie Gorelick and deflect criticism from the Clinton Administration so like all other “bi-partisan commissions” this one will be useless, too.
Category: Politics, Walter Reed
