A(nother) Crock of Shit

Gary Cross decides that Democrats don't really support the troops because John Murtha, David Obey and James McGovern have proposed that we actually ask the American people to pay for the war through a surtax referred to as the "McGovern surtax" after the Worcester, Ma representative.

I suppose that the GOP supports the troops, evidenced by

1. conditions at Walter Reed;
   
2. extending troop deployments from 12 to 15 months;
   
3. stop-loss orders & recruitment;
   
4. denial of VA benefits;
   
5. hanging the troops out to dry with lack of armored vests and vehicles;
   
6. obscured and juggled figures and reporting on the maimed, wounded and killed*;
   
7. reductions in the budget for handling returning vets service-related injuries and disabilities;
   
8. paying private contractors at multiples of what we pay US soldiers — even the British pay 100% more;
   
9. cutting the combat pay and family separation allowance by 60% since 2003 to a measly $100 a month;
   
10. doing absolutely nothing to help military families, including the 25,000 families that are on food stamps — food stamps for crying out loud! What a disgrace!

And you’re all worried about John Murtha? Can’t you have the intellectual honesty to look at how Bush is merely militaristic and not pro-military? How out of touch are you?

In 1999, Bush the candidate wrote “A volunteer military has only two paths. It can lower its standards to fill its ranks. Or it can inspire the best and brightest** to join and stay.” Yet, after having 6 years, mostly with a free hand to spend as much as they wanted, the conditions for the troops remain largely unchanged. The troops don’t even qualify for Bush’s hyped child tax credit… because they make too little! Not only that, but Bush even had the gall to propose that combat pay not count towards eligibility for food stamps in 2005.

No, make no mistake about it. The Bush cabal cares no more about our troops than they did about serving our country in Vietnam. The presnit puts the W in aWol, bested only by five-deferment Dick, flag pin on his lapel and all.

And the idea that, somehow, by Murtha jumping to a conclusion before the facts are in, by MoveOn using a rhyme to make a point, and/or by Democrats calling for an end to the War makes them less patriotic or caring for our troops, is, forgive my language, a crock of shit.

---

* Interesting item of note (of what's missing): I input the entire sentence "obscured and juggled figures and reporting on the maimed, wounded and killed" into Google, and this was the first page that was listed.

** Another Google oddity: when searching for the original source, and using the entire quote as the search term, it was Donald Rumsfeld's swearing-in ceremony commemorative booklet in pdf format that came up first. I had to put George Bush in the search term to find a speech by W. which referenced his earlier (ghost-written) work.