Comments Posted By Richard Bottoms
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Could we care about something really important because I'm having a hard time giving a damn about this.
How about the soldiers that conservatives lurvvv so much. Try being outraged about this for a few days please.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 15.11.2009 @ 14:51Things had already begun to change dramatically at the VA by early 2005, shortly after Roger Benimoff left for his second deployment to Iraq. Many appointees at the agency were disturbed that so many Iraq veterans showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part the concern grew from skepticism about the diagnosis itself, which some believed to be a legacy of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Whatever the merits of the diagnosis, it was clearly widespread and, moreover, staggeringly expensive to treat. In 2008 the RAND Corporation put a number on the problem, reporting that one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered some form of mental illness, mostly PTSD and depression.
The 2010 budget proposed by President Obama includes the largest funding increase for veterans in the past thirty years, and much of it is devoted to treatment of PTSD.
The new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, a retired general who was injured in Vietnam (and fought with Rumsfeld over the size of the force needed in Iraq), has shown a strong commitment to the care of veterans.
Unfortunately, bureaucracies are slow to respond. After years of neglect during the Bush administration, veterans now have nearly one million claims pending, a record high for the agency. VA officials say that, technically, it is not a backlog, because thousands of claims are resolved each month, and thousands more are added. But none can deny that the situation is enormously frustrating for suffering veterans.
The political fallout from the Iraq war and the government’s failure to care for its veterans has been far-reaching. Shortly before Benimoff resumed his chaplaincy—now at Walter Reed—stories describing inadequate treatment at the hospital appeared in The Washington Post, appalling the public. “I was walking into an institutional crisis,” he wrote. “I’ll speak for myself when I say it felt like everything was broken. If the system was broken, so was I—a broken healer for broken soldiers in a broken system. God save us all.
SOME SHORT NOTES ON KSM AND AMERICAN JUSTICE
One more thing for Reynolds: it’s pathetic to keep trying to characterize people — and they are by no means all conservatives — who want to act aggressively, yet prudently to prevent future terrorist attacks on US soil as nervous nellies and cowards.
You mean the ones who are all for holding anyone the president decides is a terrorist indefinitely without regard for rule of law or the Geneva convention, torture them if we like, beating and freezing some of them to death (Dilawar), send innocent men to be brutalized via rendition (Maher Arar) and then have a gigantic fainting spell when it comes time to bring some of them to trail in the city they attacked.
You mean that reaction?
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 19:27
And why bother busting him out? Is he the only “mastermind” they have that can plan attacks? Is he that valuble to AlQ?
They'll hire Magneto and he'll fly in all cool and junk after ripping the roof off of the courthouse and then Cyclops will like totally blow him out of the window, but Magneto was really just making a distraction so Mystique who was disguised as Eric Holder all along could use Jean Grey's powers to try to fly them both out of there but Wolverine is going to slice off her head and say "Got you now Bub" right before he shoves his claws through KSM's chest.
Or not.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 18:42
New Yorkers lined up in droves to vote for this unqualifed, incompetent F@@@. Sometimes you get what you want.
A president who can string a sentence together with something greater than grade school competency, and the guts to tell the terrorists we decide how we run our country.
It's about time we sent a gigantic FU to Bin Laden. They're coming for us no matter what we do, or what bed Republicans care to hide under.
Justice will be dealt, and it's Osama who just got served.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 17:21
It’s almost as if they were positioning themselves to profit politically from any future terrorist attack.
No way.
That would be low down slimy getter politics.
Oh wait, you're talking about the GOP.
Never mind.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 16:04
Yes. KSM is just another terrorist.
Did he build a laser satellite out of diamonds and fry Idaho?
Maybe he captured the Space Shuttle and hid it in a secret base in a volcano?
Pushed the Moon out of orbit? Stopped time?
No, he took an idea from a Tom Clancy book (or the first episode of "The Lone Gunmen") and pulled it off.
He had four planes hijacked and successfully flew three of them into some buildings. Evil yes, but hardly on par with Spectre.
It was our failure of imagination that allowed it to happen, but it was hardly a crime that only the evillest man in all of history could have pulled off.
Put him on trial, use the non-torture produced evidence to convict him and then take a needle to the bastard.
I used to think conservatives were tough.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 15:12
Still and all, we didn’t try them in Cuba. Huh. I guess we weren’t huge pussies in those days.
Got that right.
My comments come from someone willing to raise his hand and wear the uniform, not from Chickenhawk tough guys like Hannity who have all the guts in the world when it's someone else's kid on the firing line.
The Republicans have been pushing the idea that we are in the fight of our lives, a war to put all other wars to shame and now that our president has said, yeah you're right it's time to bring in the fainting couches.
Rick, being a vet isn't in that category so I am surprised that he finds Obama's display of fortitude to be troubling.
We can't run from these guys. And, we aren't so afraid of them that we must abandon our morals to torture and suspension of the rule of law to beat them.
What we are is the United States of America dammit, and we will pursue justice and freedom in the face of evil.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 14:30
The Right has begun wetting their pants at the thought of America being strong enough o try the monsters of the world right where they committed their heinous acts instead of on a remote island in the middle of the ocean.
KSM isn't frakking Bloefeld or Magneto for crissakes. And just when did the idea that the radical Muslims hate us and attack us no matter what we do go away?
In the Battlestar Galactica episode "Hand of God" Adama says that eventually you have to stop running and punch the neighborhood bully right in the nose.
F*** Osama.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 14.11.2009 @ 14:09
MORE THAN POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OR VICTIMHOOD AT WORK IN FORT HOOD ATTACK
If you know about the regs and you start toting up how many he’d obviously broken, the coddling becomes obvious.
Thats kind of my point, his behavior broke the regs, his contacts should have tripped the interest of the CID at least, and on strictly clinical level his supervisors should have kept better tabs on the mental health of among the psychiatric staff.
Alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression are rampant among health care professionals in and out of the Army. There's a reg for everything and I am sure one or more were not followed in dealing with his Fitness Reports.
I think it is less that no one wanted to offend a Muslim, rather that no one wanted to hurt a fellow officer's career especially a fellow doctor. Doctors have always been able to bend the rules that others can't because they are in such short supply.
Why make a Captain's salary, and get shot at o boot when you could be in private practice someplace.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 12.11.2009 @ 21:30
I hope a fair minded investigation is undertaken and the truth is fully established, wherever it leads. I suspect it leads to PC sensitivities giving Maj. Hasan a pass that would not have been given had his religion been christian. Whatever the truth ends up being, let justice be served.
There's no one who has been in the military recently that can say Christians are in any, way shape, or form marginalized.
My section sergeant all but asked me to come be baptized at his church. There's is non-stop pressure to be a believer and I am certain the officer corps get way more pressure than enlisted men do to be "born again" if they want to move up.
Muslim troops were outsiders way back in 91' when I got out, you think there's less harassment post 9/11?
The only thing lower would be someone thought to be a "faggot".
Hence, precious resources being used to hunt them down, focusing on who's a dyke instead of who is dangerous.
Puh-leze.
Comment Posted By Richard bottoms On 12.11.2009 @ 18:11
