• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Thank You For Your Service: Republican Edition

Alcoholic Actuary

Alcoholic Actuary

Veteran Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2005
Messages
1,022
Location
SoCal
Basic Beliefs
Atheist
Just shut the fu** up already. You only care that you can live safely while deteriorating society.

Republicans block bill aiding veterans impacted by burn pits and other toxic chemicals

Apparent news flash - it costs money! Not like cutting taxes for the wealthy money, but still. We can't realistically send high school grads to imminent danger and potential death without VERY nice equipment, but if they come back - well - that's not in the budget.
But those same spending concerns didn't seem to pose an initial concern for the more than two dozen Republicans who voted for it last month only to abruptly change their stance. They are: Sens. John Barrasso, Marsha Blackburn, Roy Blunt, Mike Braun, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton, Kevin Cramer, Ted Cruz, Joni Ernst, Deb Fischer, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Jim Inhofe, Ron Johnson, John Kennedy, Roger Marshall, Mitch McConnell, Rob Portman, Ben Sasse, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Dan Sullivan and Todd Young. Sens. Additionally, Sens. Steve Daines and Roger Wicker voted against the bill after not voting in June.

"Every single one has pictures with veterans on their Facebook pages, on their websites," said Susan Zeier, Heath Robinson's mother-in-law, outside the Capitol as her 9-year-old granddaughter wept nearby. "Well, screw that, they don't support veterans. If you won't vote on this bill, you do not support veterans."
Click to expand...
seriously why?

aa
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
Why? GOP. Evil, wicked, unAmerican, unpatriotic, and stupid. Remember, this has happened before. Remember agent orange?
Click to expand...
Remember Jon Stewart? He advocated for this nine months ago. I guess he's addicted to causes that Mitch McConnel finds repulsive.

This is not an exaggeration. Stewart's reaction to this is even more pronounced than when Republicans told 9/11 First Responders to fuck off and die:

 
Ya gotta get ‘em while the yellow ribbons and American flags are still plastered to the back of the SUVs. Now they’ll just wait them out until enough of them are dead. Perhaps appropriate some funds when there are so few left most of those funds get returned to the treasury. That fucking tortoise should be about 150 by then.
 
Fox News finally agreed to have Stewart on their network. He subtly called out their obsession with Hunter Biden and their scaremongering about Muslims.



The other thing...in neither of these videos is Jon reading prepared remarks off a teleprompter. He knows his stuff, and pulls no punches. Finally, this guy is what Fox would call "a Hollywood liberal elite," but he's spent the years since he left the air fighting for veterans and 9/11 first responders, while the right wing just slaps a "support the troops" or "never forget" sticker on the back of their SUV and figures "welp, I've done my part."
 
Tigers! said:
If you got ill while in uniform why you not be covered?

Agent Orange comes to my mind.
Click to expand...

Well there's the rub. I'm of the radical opinion that if you put on the uniform and became ill as a result of that stint in service - wounded in combat, mental health issues that stem from being in combat, Agent Orange or burn pits, etc. - then that's it. The country owes you not just lifetime healthcare, but the best care available. This is what it means to "support the troops" or "support our veterans."

What appears to have happened here is that veterans who were harmed while serving had to fight to get the care they needed, deserved, and earned, but at the last minute a bunch of Republican Senators pulled the rug out from under them because they were throwing a tantrum over Schumer getting Manchin on board with a bill the Democrats wanted to pass.

Wounded veterans - and make no mistake they were wounded by this toxic shit - were denied support because "these motherfuckers" (as Stewart so eloquently put it) wanted to score some temporary political points. The truly sad part about it is that McConnell, Toomey, Cruz, and all the rest of these motherfuckers won't pay a price for fucking over the veterans. It was a clean bill by all accounts, the cost should be irrelevant because we should spare no expense for these people, but it got shelved because Republicans are butt-hurt that they got outmaneuvered on a bill that had nothing to do with this.
 
This isn't news. It's sad but it isn't news. Our veterans have never received the hero's care they deserve. My first experience seeing vets was in the early sixties volunteering at a local veterans' hospital. It was shameful these guys who fought in WW2, the care they were receiving. It sure put some reality into my young life at the time, it opened my eyes.

I think there's a deep seated resentment toward caring for veterans. Yes, there are scammers, I know a few. But I think the sentiment is that these folks got paid and cared for, no one forced them to sign up.

We feel good honoring these folks in word but in deed not much has changed or will ever change. The best care and concern for veterans comes from veterans. They seem to understand. Non-vets don't get it, generally speaking.
 
The absurdity of pretending to care about the well-being of people who we send to their deaths without a second thought. Of course "we" don't take care of veterans, they were only instrumentally useful to the State. When they can't or won't put their body in front of any more bullets, the government loses interest in them, just as quickly as a corporation forgets about a worker who can't work anymore, or children forget their parents and grandparents once they're in the senior home. American culture is invariably cruel to those considered "useless" to the whole. Republicans are more openly vicious about it, but the fundamental hypocrisy is shared. It's easy to propose a bill that you know won't pass.

If we really cared about veterans, we wouldn't have poisoned them in the first place. There was no good reason to have people stationed in Iraq at all, let alone stationed next a burn pit that could have been made safer with minimal expenditure. Do you know what a burn pit even is? It's not the solution for waste disposal that you would choose if you cared about the long term wellbeing of your "assets".
 
Patooka said:
Tigers! said:
Agent Orange comes to my mind.
Click to expand...
That's what this bill was supposed to address. Yes, there are still US veterans who have no healthcare for the illness they contracted in Vietnam.
Click to expand...
It would also allow veterans suffering with these ailments to get treatments closer to their homes, from non VA providers.
 
Patooka said:
Tigers! said:
Agent Orange comes to my mind.
Click to expand...
That's what this bill was supposed to address. Yes, there are still US veterans who have no healthcare for the illness they contracted in Vietnam.
Click to expand...
"Contract an illness" seems like a very polite way to say that their government knowingly poisoned them with dioxin. It wasn't an accident, everyone knew it was a poison in 1960 as well. Just like the burn pits. Ask any child on the street "Is it safe to breathe in dioxin and/or jet fuel?", and they will probably be able to guess the right answer. So it wasn't a mistake. They just needed those forests cleared more than they needed their soldiers to be healthy later. They knew they would never have to pay for it, so it was no skin off their back if thousands of "assets" and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilivians got sick later They'd happily do it again, if it hadn't become "politically incorrect" to do.

By the numbers, if you were a soldier in Vietnam, the danger posed by the Viet Cong was minimal compared to the danger posed by the United States. Only 58,000 American soldiers died in combat*, in Vietnam. More than 300,000 have died from Agent Orange, and it's still killing; people who weren't even born when the war ended will still be slowly dying from the birth defects it caused, decades from now. Who cares? Soldier's bodies don't belong to themselves, their lives are a free gift to be thrown away in whatever manner suits the whims of the State. It was very important to "defend our honor" in the forests of Vietnam, slaughtering 3.1 million people in a war we lost anyway.
 
I strongly suspect that a majority of veterans lean towards the GOP. It is possible that adroit Democratic candidates could use this vote to help defeat some of their GOP opponents. Really, it is pretty much an anti-veteran vote.
 
Madge does it again. First there was the gazpacho police and peach tree dishes. Now they've 'perched' the military.

 
laughing dog said:
I strongly suspect that a majority of veterans lean towards the GOP. It is possible that adroit Democratic candidates could use this vote to help defeat some of their GOP opponents. Really, it is pretty much an anti-veteran vote.
Click to expand...
57% of veterans are Trump voters. God knows why. But it is unlikely to change. If Trump standing in front of a live microphone and slamming POWs to their faces didn't lose him the vote, what would? Not a vote on a "partisan bill" that the Fox cycle is already explaining away as perfectly reasonable.
 
Not
Politesse said:
The absurdity of pretending to care about the well-being of people who we send to their deaths without a second thought. Of course "we" don't take care of veterans, they were only instrumentally useful to the State. When they can't or won't put their body in front of any more bullets, the government loses interest in them, just as quickly as a corporation forgets about a worker who can't work anymore, or children forget their parents and grandparents once they're in the senior home. American culture is invariably cruel to those considered "useless" to the whole. Republicans are more openly vicious about it, but the fundamental hypocrisy is shared. It's easy to propose a bill that you know won't pass.

If we really cared about veterans, we wouldn't have poisoned them in the first place. There was no good reason to have people stationed in Iraq at all, let alone stationed next a burn pit that could have been made safer with minimal expenditure. Do you know what a burn pit even is? It's not the solution for waste disposal that you would choose if you cared about the long term wellbeing of your "assets"
Click to expand...
Not unlike a baby you must carry to term (congratulations!), but we're not that proud of it that we'd spend money on it.

aa
 
T.G.G. Moogly said:
This isn't news. It's sad but it isn't news. Our veterans have never received the hero's care they deserve.
Click to expand...
It's news every time it happens. This particular problem was fixed - until republicans decided it wasn't worth the expenditure. If we don't report it in 'the news' then we accept that it is status quo.

aa
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom