The Orange Boner refuses to let Frank Buckles lie in state at the Capitol. What's he afraid of, that other living WW1 veterans would want the same honor? Oh wait, that's right, there ARE no other living WW1 veterans!
The Rethugs talk a good game about being "patriotic real Americans", but when it comes time to put their actions where their mouth lives, well...
-- Badtux the Hypocrisy Penguin
Our new military governor of Afghanistan, General Julius Petraeus Maximus, says a brazen daylight attack on a NATO base means the Taliban are getting desperate. For some definition of "desperate" that includes controlling parts of the country that hold more than half of Afghanistan's population, I suppose. Just another day in the chronicles of desperation...
But never fear, General Julius Petraeus Maximus's legions will pacify Germanica any day, any day now, I say! And once they turn their eyes back homeward after their 20 year tour of duty is up, I'm sure they'll fit back into civil society just fine, yo...
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
"Soldiers Get Strange", by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. Jason is a kinda doughy youngster who, in person, sounds kinda goofy. But when he gets up on that stage and sings a song like this, he's damn well serious. The Drive By Truckers pulled him in as a guitarist when their prior guitarist left and Jason stepped in and not only played guitar, but contributed some of the best songs on the three albums he was with the Truckers. Now Jason's on his own, touring, touring, touring, never staying in any city more than two days at a time. I suppose some people have so many things happening in their head that they can't stand to stay in one place too long for fear that something will explode.
-- Badtux the Merry Christmas Penguin
Both the left and right blogospheres are up in arms about a proposal by the Obama Administration to have the VA bill private health insurers for service-related conditions. At which point, my bullshit detector goes off and I go research and say, oooh, boy. What a bunch of pantywaists.
See, here's the deal: The VA proposal would not deny care to a single veteran. The veteran would show up at the VA as usual for care for his service-related conditions. The VA would take care of the veteran as usual. *IF* the veteran had private insurance because, for example, he worked for a large corporation and was covered under that large corporation's group policy, the VA would also bill that private insurer thus helping out the VA budget by skimming some of health insurers' obscene profits. If the veteran did not, the VA would still provide care as under the current system.
In short, I'm trying to figure out why so many people have their panties in a wad, and I ain't seein' it. I can see why health insurers would be screaming bloody murder because the administration is threatening to skim some of their obscene profits to help cover veterans' health care expenses. But why are so many left-wing bloggers going along with this bullshit, giving cover to obscenely profitable health insurers who are upset that they will be required to, like, actually spend some money on health care? This penguin is confused!
-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin
PS: Screaming health insurers and their useful idiots on the left and right have successfully defeated this proposal to tax their insane profits in order to help improve veteran's health care. Way to go, useful idiots!
We already know who Sarah Palin and John McCain believe are real Americans. Sarah Palin says, "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation." "Real Americans," according to Sarah Palin's warped version of reality, live exclusively in small towns and have good Anglo-Saxon surnames and attend evangelical churches and vote Republican. "Real Americans" don't carry passports or speak French or consort with foreigners. "Real Americans" know that nothing worthwhile ever came from a book unless it was the Good Book. "Real Americans" get their news from Fox.
And according to McCain/Palin, the following two people are not real Americans:
If Sarah Palin was in front of me right now, I'd slap her bigoted racist lying fucking face.
UPDATEe: Chairwoman of Otero County Republican Party weighs in that Muslims are not real Americans. Ms. Marcia Stirman apparently believes that Cpl. Khan was an enemy of America. She is lucky that she is in New Mexico and I am not.
UPDATE2: Apparently Sarah Palin thinks real Americans spend $150,000 for clothes. As someone who buys most of his clothes from Wal-Mart, I assure you that it's damned hard to spend $150,000 for clothes from Wal-Mart, unless you bring a dump truck with you. Does that mean Sarah Palin isn't a real American? Hmm...
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin
Bob Geiger tells us what he saw -- or, rather, didn't see:
In three nights of speeches by McCain, his running mate and all the major Republican presidential contenders, not one word was said about the troops they claim to adore, the cause they all continue to advance or the Veterans they say they support. ... McCain spent three days focusing on his life and what he went through 35 years ago without one word about the lives of the military people suffering in his war, today.Which party is it that's supposed to hate our troops, again?!Republicans talked a lot this week about highlighting the "stark contrasts" between their candidate and Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama -- and here is that contrast: When Obama spoke last week in Denver, he talked movingly about being "… more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets" and spoke about how "in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton's Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill."
He also talked, as he has many times in his U.S. Senate tenure, about how he will "give better care for our veterans" and said that, in addition to so many children to protect, we have "so many veterans to care for."
And what did the major speakers at the Republican convention, including McCain and Palin -- the "country first" crowd -- have to say on the subject?
Nada, nothing.
-- Badtux the Puzzled Penguin
Disgusting. John McCain says that VA should only treat combat injuries -- not any other service-related health issues. "Let them eat cake" appears to be his attitude toward all other veterans. Crashed your Humvee in Iraq because you were under fire and hit a drainage ditch and broke your neck when the Humvee flipped and are paralyzed? John McCain sez you don't deserve VA health care because that was a traffic accident, not a combat injury, and so you should just go home and die.
VA remains mired in crisis due to the poor planning by the Bush administration to handle the tidal wave of 325,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran casualties now being treated at VA hospitals and clinics, not because the VA is also treating people suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, Agent Orange, and other service-related ailments. A Presidential candidate whose solution to the problem of poor planning by the Bush Administration is to cut services promised to our veterans, rather than to promise to fund those services with all the money needed, is beneath contempt.
Yes, I am saying that John McCain is beneath contempt for making such a suggestion. He just spit on our veterans. Maybe not literally, but just as bad. John McCain just showed that he's even less patriotic than Jane Fonda. Disgusting. Just disgusting. What next, he proposes to bite off the heads of kittens or boil babies?!
-- Badtux the Outraged Penguin
It is Memorial Day in the United States, a day when Americans go out and put flowers on the graves of those who have died, a day when politicians and celebrities trot out that old lie of the soldiers who have died to "protect our freedoms". Of course, that is not true. There have only been two wars where "our freedoms" have in any way been at risk -- the American Revolution, and WWII when Japan and Germany declared war on us. All of this nation's other wars have been for other reasons -- to protect American markets, to enrich war profiteers, to steal territories from neighboring nations, to assist other nations perceived to be allies, for oil, or otherwise having nothing to do with defending America's freedoms. As far as protecting our freedoms in other ways, the U.S. Army protected the freedom of blacks to vote in the South during the time period 1867 to 1874, and protected the freedom of blacks to attend Little Rock High School and the University of Mississippi in 1957 and 1962, but otherwise have defended no other freedoms.
Why, then, do we go through this charade of dishonesty every single year? Perhaps the story of Jessica Ellis may hold a clue. In reality, Jessica Ann Ellis died because she was sent to war by a President who thinks that giving up golf is a sacrifice in order to further some intellectual masturbation about magic ponies on the part of neo-cons who still insist that Iraq + soldiers = democracy, or ponies, or oil coming out of everybody's assholes, whatever. But that is a hard and bitter lump to swallow. Thus the lie, the same old lie we always hear this time of year. The lie about the soldiers "defending our freedoms". The same old lies of valor, honor, and courage, time after time.
The lie will not bring back Jessica Ann Ellis, or the thousands of other Americans dead in Iraq. The lie will not make whole the 30,000+ Americans who have had limbs blown off, or resuscitate the dead brain cells of the 250,000 Americans who've had their heads hammered inside their helmets by explosions in Iraq, or bring back the 1,000,000 Iraqis who have died in the past five years who would be alive if not for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the lie gives comfort to those who would otherwise be outraged, angry, and heartbroken, and woe to he who would say truth in a land of lies. We cherish our lies, and hold them dear to our hearts here in the United States of Delusion. We cherish our lies, and woe to he who would puncture them under the harsh light of truth. They crucified Jesus, after all.
-- Badtux the Memorial Penguin
I know that I have posted this before. But it is too appropriate to this weekend. Peace.
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are over 600,000 soldiers and Marines back from Iraq and Vietnam who need help. But never fear, Dear Leader feels their pain. To honor the sacrifice of US soldiers and Marines killed, maimed, blinded, disembowelled, decapitated, castrated, rendered insane, and otherwise shattered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is he going to fight for full funding for the VA? For more money for treating PTSD and better processing of disability payments for people whose brains were forever ruined by being rattled around in their skulls like a buncha marbles in a beach ball?
Uh, no. He is going to... err... ah... give up golf.
And penguins weep :-(.
-- Badtux the Unsnarky Penguin
Folks say "well, sure, the Iraq war has been hard on Iraqis, but at least there aren't hundreds of thousands of American dead." Well, true enough. Modern body armor will keep our soldiers from dying. But 620,000 soldiers and Marines -- or roughly 1/3rd of those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan -- come back and end up either disabled or suffering PTSD. To quote a report on the topic:
According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care.
And from the Bush Administration, all you hear is that adequate VA care for these disabled is "pork", thus why they're fighting the latest war funding act which calls for full funding for the VA as well as full funding of the GI Bill to pay for college for veterans. They call this "pork". And say we can't afford this -- the minimum that we owe to veterans for sending them into harm's way in a useless war. For shame, George W. Bush and Republicans. For shame. Why do you hate our veterans so much? Is it because they're heros, and you're just a draft dodging dry drunk whose daddy's friends bought you the Presidency but you will always, forever and ever, be a failure? Or is it just that you're an evil mean-spirited dry drunk? I suppose we'll never know...
-- Badtux the Unsnarky Penguin
Lately I've noticed an interesting bit of pro-war propaganda hitting our newsstands. I'll call it "disabled war veteran porn", because that's what it is -- porn, just glossy images that in no way reflect reality.
Now, here's how it works. You get this war veteran who had shit blown off of him. Maybe his legs got blown off, or his arms, whatever. So here comes the porn part -- the inevitable story where some dude who got shit blown off of him is playing lacrosse, or running a race, or climbing Everest, or some shit like that. And then the American sheeple nod and say to themselves, "see, getting your legs blown off in war isn't such a bad thing after all! What a brave man" and go fucking shopping instead of doing something to end an illegal-ass war that's accomplishing nothing except educating a buncha goddamned jihadis in how to kill Americans, and killing and disabling a shitload of people who ain't done nothing wrong other than have the bad luck to be in the way of bombs or bullets intended for someone else.
Let me educate you on something here. That dude isn't playing lacrosse or climbing Everest or whatever because he's "a brave man" or some shit. He's doing it because the alternative is blowing his fucking brains out. Because when you're missing a piece of your body, that's it. You're never gonna have it again. And you goddamn well know it when you get out of bed every morning, you know that a piece of you is gone and it ain't ever fucking gonna come back. So either you whimper and whine, or you live the best way you can with what you got left and do what you fucking gotta do to keep yourself from blowing your fucking head off. And we're tough monkeys, so most of us don't eat a barrel. But I assure you, I might go off hiking in the middle of a goddamned wilderness even though I'm missing part of my foot, but I damn well know I'm missing part of my foot. And it ain't comin' back. But I do what I do, and what I can't do, I don't do, or I figure some other way to do it. That's just how it fucking works.
So next time you see one of those feel-good disabled war porn stories in the media, remember the real story -- the story of some poor bastard who is never, ever going to be the same person he was before he ended up in the cat box getting pieces of himself blown up, and all the brave-ass goddamned feel-good stories in the media ain't gonna get him whole again and he fucking goddamned well knows it even if the average American is too goddamned stupid and apathetic to know or give a shit. You see some disabled veteran climbing goddamned Everest or running a race or whatever bullshit the media is pumping at ya, remember this: you're looking at a dude who is doing that because the alternative is eating a bullet. No more, no less. But it ain't ever going to make him whole again, and he's never going to wake up the same person that he was five years ago. Never. Regardless of how many goddamned feel-good stories get written about his ass.
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin
Busheviks say they weren't covering up suicide rate amongst veterans, rather, the problem is "It's been hard to track exactly". In other words, it's the Sergeant Shultz Defense:
Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snark Penguin
Homeless Iraq/Afghanistan vets a growing problem.
U.S. Army sends wounded soldiers back to Iraq.
Violence kills dozens of innocents in Iraq.
I don't know what to say. The mess in Mesopotamia is destroying so many lives...
-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin
59-year-old grandmother Army Reservist back from tour of duty in Iraq. Captain Susan Max was given 15 days leave to celebrate her 35th wedding anniversary with her husband, and will be headed back to Iraq in a week. And yes, she carries a gun in an "unsecured" area of Baghdad. She joined the Reserves as a nurse, she is deployed as a Civil Affairs officer because apparently CA officers are in even shorter supply than nurses. That's the folks who work with the pointy tip of the spear, if you know what I mean.
Yep, a nurse has been given a gun and sent into combat. But what do you expect from an administration which allows 25% of veterans lack health insurance coverage? And which doesn't care that 25% of the homeless are veterans? The Busheviks may praise veterans, but really, they don't view them as anything other than political props or nice tin soldiers to move around on the map. What a bunch of friggin' sociopaths...
-- Badtux the Veterans Day Penguin
Twelve former Army captains whine that Dear Leader's little war for, uhm, whatever, is a friggin' mess.
Expecting the Chickenhawks of the 101st Bloggin' Keyboarders to swiftly rush to their keyboards in their Mommies basements and pound out with their little Cheeto-stained fingers that these twelve captains are, like, obviously just a bunch of phony soldiers, unlike the brave men of the 101st Bloggin' Keyboarders who so proudly defend our nation from their Mommy's basements despite the aweful stench of a trashcan full of soiled Kleenexes due to their incessant circle-jerking... expecting, just about, uhm, oops, incoming! (No, do not click on said linkedy link unless you want to read drivel pounded on a keyboard with the Cheeto-stained fingers of a 101st Bloggin' Keyboarder who, uhm, like, never has served in Iraq and never personally known anyone who did because, ah, err, oh yeah, the war of ideas is more important, no cowardice involved just, uhm, ah, oh look over there it's a 12 year old kid dissin' Dear Leader! GET HIM!).
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Yeah, he volunteered... to defend our nation. He didn't volunteer for this.
Why are his mother and father having to empty their savings and sell their home in order to care for this poor soul? Why isn't the Department of Defense and VA taking on all the costs of his care? Oh nevermind. Support the troops. Unless the troops are injured or disabled or homeless. In that case, fuck the troops. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarkless Penguin
Sergeant Frank Sandoval has died. He had the signature injury of the Iraq war -- traumatic brain injury. Afterwards, he had the mental ability of the typical five year old, and because much of his skull was missing, was required to wear a helmet to protect his exposed brain. He died during surgery to implant plates in his head to protect his exposed brain, a little over a year after he was evacuated from Iraq.
How many other Frank Sandovals are there out there who have not been counted as victims of Dear Leader's little war for oil because they died months after they were evacuated from Iraq, not immediately? We'll never know. Those statistics are not being collected. How many other Frank Sandovals are there out there who come back missing major chunks of their brain and will never be the person they once were again? Once again, we'll never know. Those statistics are not being collected. They might be embarrassing to Dear Leader and hurt support for Vice President Halliburton's holy quest to secure the Middle East's oil for Halliburton, after all....
-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin
Yes, he really said that when, as an ex-Marine who had been honorably discharged, a Major wrote an EMAIL telling him he couldn't participate in anti-war protests. Talk about jar-heads!
So what's the Marine Corps' response?
Well, they decided to rescind his honorable discharge, and offered him a less-than-honorable discharge if he'd just shut the fuck up. So what does he tell'em?
"Go fuck yourself" again.
Some folks got stones the size of fuggin' beach balls.
I dunno what kinda love we can give Adam Kokesh, but I'm sure that the only way they'll shut up this PFC ("Proud Fuckin' Civilian") is if they put him in jail. Meanwhile, the Marines ought to be ashamed for trying to shut up a civilian honorably seperated from the Marines by revoking his honorable discharge. That kinda political bullshit acting as political operatives for the Bushevik regime is not what the military is supposed to be about. Our military is supposed to be about killing our nation's enemies dead, not about suppressing free speech within the borders of our country. There's a name for the kind of country where the military is used to suppress free speech within the borders of the country. It's called "military dictatorship". It's not what our nation is supposed to be about. For shame, General Moore!
-- Badtux the Stones-appreciatin' Penguin
This guy is where all the brain-injured veterans from Iraq are going to be in 20 years time -- homeless, wandering the streets in a daze, eating out of dumpsters and sleeping in them at night, and occasionally getting dumped into a trash truck and (usually) squeezed to death.
Yes, we are such a charitable and Christian nation, to do this to some poor guy who is missing part of his brain due to a gunshot...
-- Badtux the Ashamed Penguin
