Keeping IVAW honest
At IVAWActions, members of IVAW outline their goals that they think Barack Obama should work on. I’ll admit that they appear pretty realistic, but, like most of the Left, they tend to inflate their numbers mostly to make the Bush Administration look bad and when Obama is in office, they’ll cite the actual numbers to prove Obama has improved veterans’ conditions. So this is my attempt to set the record straight.
Allow All Veterans Back into the VA
When troops serve, they are not divided by income class or priority groups. Yet today the VA is picking and choosing which veterans to serve. Barack Obama is committed to ending the unfair ban on healthcare enrollment of certain groups of veterans, including “Priority 8” veterans who often earn modest incomes. He has voted to end this unfair policy, which has resulted in the VA turning away nearly one million veterans since 2003. As president, one of Barack Obama’s first acts will be signing an executive order reversing this ban.
OK, who are these “modest income”veterans who should gain immediate access to VA benefits according to IVAW? Well, priority category 8 veterans are the lowest priority and the VA has stopped enrolling them in the system. They have no service-connected disability and they’re higher income veterans who can afford their own health insurance. They have a net worth of greater than $80,000.
So I guess my question to the IVAW is; if you want to end backlogs and you want the VA fully-funded, why would you want to waste resources on admitting people into the system who don’t need it? Not every single veteran needs to be admitted to the system – if they wanted to be in the system, they’d have done 20 years. The attempt to get access for category 8 vets is just an attempt to drain the system of dollars that are needed for other more critical expenditures.
In the next paragraph, the IVAW claims that there are over 800,000 claims backlogged at the VA – I just can’t find a number to support that. The closest I can find is a statistic from a year ago that admits to 400,000 backlogged claims at The Navy Times. It’s still a lot and should be reduced, but inflating numbers isn’t the way to do it. As I quoted the other day, the VA had over 250,000 new claims last year and 89% of those have already been processed.
Speaking of inflating numbers, IVAW claims that there over 200,000 homeless veterans on any given night. The VA admits to 154,000 – again 154,000 too many, but faking the numbers doesn’t help the IVAW message.
Veterans issues are important, especially in the coming four years when Democrats traditionally scrutinize veterans benefits before they look at any other spending for the axe. Doubling the numbers doesn’t help veterans at all since we’re always held to a higher standard than the K Street lobbyists who scrambling to scoop up veterans’ money for their own useless benefit.
Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War
So the IVAW (Members range from actual vets to outright phony soldiers, but all failures) has never used an accurate number and are still using phony numbers and someone is supposed to believe them. Most VA organizations bend over backwards to help vets, even those who file phony claims (probably over 50% of the claims are phony).
Membership in the IVAW should be accompanied by an OTH discharge, automatically. The scum are traitors.
When IVAW type losers show up at a recruiter’s doorstep, can’t we arrange some sort of pre-Treason diversion program to keep them out of the system?
AMH1 Cassel:
Fortunately, the military service disagrees with you. IVAW is not an un-american organization, and the military service has deemed it perfectly legal to belong to. Those of us with clearances have kept them, and many of us have been promoted since joining.
However, if you want to time-travel about fifty years, I’m sure the junior senator from Wisconsin would be interested. After all, over four hundred is no doubt better than 205. No need to be bothered by any particulars of truth or lies.
A/S, “IVAW is not an un-american organization…” Yeah and water isn’t wet. You clowns had Thompson Bradley as one of your “Security” team at WS 2.0. Checkout “The People of this Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia” by Paul Lyons, 2003. Your boy Tommie the Commie is outted as being an enemy collaborator who went to Budapest in 1968 with a group that included Bernadine Dorhn. He’s also in Kathy Wilkerson’s Biography & Autobiography book, “Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman” 2007 on Page 81. The son of a bitch included in hearings by two Democrat led Congressional Committees: Investigation of Attempts to Subvert the United States Armed Services by Committee on Internal Security, United States Congress. House. Committee on Internal Security, United States, Congress, House – Subversive activities – 1972 Extent of Subversion in Campus Disorders: Testimony of Ernesto E. Blanco by United States Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws – 1969 And he relived the good old days with Wilkerson at “The New Left and Swarthmore College,” panel on “The Student Left,” (With Kathy Wilkerson, Thompson Bradley, Paul Booth) “Teach Your Children Well: The Sixties Remembered” Program Of the Swarthmore Alumni College June 2, 2004. That wasn’t 40 years ago, that was 4 years ago. BTW, Wilkerson supplied the house where the bombs built for the NCO dance at FT Dix. Read her book, her 2007 book. At the end, she discusses how they cavalierly decided to kill soldiers at Ft Dix. Nobody objected, they remained silent. Take special note of the rationale behind putting NAILS in the pipe bombs. THEY WANTED THE SOLDIERS TO SUFFER AND DIE! She repeats that point about nails several times from different angles, but the goal always comes back to make it as painful as possible. After all the decades between then and now, there’s no regrets, no remorse, no change in their beliefs. And now there’s IVAW, nutured by the 60’s radicals in VVAW, VFP… Read more »