PTSD: One family’s struggle
Go read the heartbreaking story over on The Political Carnival of a recently-returned soldier from Iraq.
I spent the past year comforting Tiffani as best I could, knowing full well he had been assigned one of this fraudulent, bloody occupation’s deadliest missions. She knew that, too. There were so many days that I’d see her dissolve into tears, terrified that she would never see her dad again. She’d hover over her cell phone waiting for a pre-arranged call, and when it didn’t come, she’d worry herself sick until she got word that he was still alive. Recently, his Humvee got hit by a roadside bomb, but he made it out alive. His friend didn’t.
He’s home, and his young daughter is seeing the ravages of war, up close and personal:
All I can do is give Tiffani hugs and words of encouragement. All she can do is hope her dad returns to someone who resembles his old self… and offer him every bit of love and encouragement a terrified 15-year-old can.
Thank you, George W. Bush. Anyone who feels anything for Tiffani should remember that John Sidney McCain promises her, and the rest of us, more of the same.
PTSD is real, visceral, and if not treated, can lead to depression, suicide, divorce, alcoholism and substance abuse.
The Bush Administration created the circumstances that caused Tiffani’s dad to suffer, but the Bush Administration wants nothing to do with the services needed to treat it. The current Army policy dictating denial of the condition wherever possible, leaves men and women who have done their duty adrift, with no pathway to treatment and healing.
Senator McCain argues that increasing benefits for veterans discourages retention. Yes, retention. Bring these stressed, traumatized soldiers back and keep ‘em in the military. Way to go, Senator McCain.
While I have respect for Senator McCain’s service and experience in Vietnam, his refusal to support suffering soldiers returning from Iraq is detestable, in my opinion. There are some things we just do because they’re the right thing to do, whether or not they cost money. If my child needs medical treatment, I get it and figure out how to pay for it after the fact.
If my country sends young men and women into battle, it damn well better expect to take care of them when they come home. Is patriotism a flag pin, or a commitment to those who were on the front lines making the sacrifice?
Sphere: Related ContentVince Bugliosi – Prosecute George W. Bush
But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That’s just common sense. If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he’d still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths?* For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did.
First Steps to Unity
California leads the way at the State Convention:
For those on the far right hoping for blood in the streets of Denver, Sunday’s meeting of the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention was very bad news. Because of its size, California is sending even more Hillary Clinton delegates to Denver than her latest putative home state of New York. But Sunday’s meeting made it clear that both the Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns are ready to turn their swords into plowshares behind the impending nomination of Obama for the greater cause of defeating John McCain.
At the Nevada state convention Saturday, Twitter user ursulas reported that even Bill Clinton was singing the party unity song.
However, on NewsGang Live, we’re still divided…over the VP nomination and whether it will go to Hillary Clinton. I argue that it cannot, will not be Hillary Clinton, for two reasons. First, because she represents the politics he is turning away from; and second, because she (and her most ardent supporters) would not want to settle for second seat.
Unity is the most important goal. While NewsGang unity may depend upon what happens at the Democratic convention, let’s hope the candidates can pull their supporters in and begin to mend fences. It seems that it may be beginning.
This election is bigger than race and gender. Seriously. Race and gender feel big because they’re so personal. But what will really feel personal is a Supreme Court that bans abortion, sets back women’s rights 50 years, while President McCain leads us into privatized Social Security and another 100 years in Iraq.
Tuesday will end it. Let’s start figuring out how to begin the pathway to a Democratic landslide in the administrative AND legislative branches in November. There will be much for all of us to do. Hillary Clinton will remain a force to contend with and a voice for women across the country.
Best of all, George Bush will be dispatched to Texas with his tail between his legs, and at long last, we will not be subject any longer to the secret authoritarian regime known as the Bush Administration.
Sphere: Related ContentDiplomacy or Death?
That’s the fundamental choice we all have in the general election. If anyone still believes that John McCain’s inner hawk isn’t dangerous, his statements today should remove all doubt.I. George W. Bush equates diplomacy and appeasement in a cheap effort to smear Barack Obama abroad.
Of course, diplomacy is not the same as appeasement at all, no matter how hard the gaseous and despicable George W. Bush may twist it. Literacy matters. Bush must have been the child left behind. Here are some definitions, for clarity’s sake:
The distinction in that last definition is worth highlighting. In order for there to be appeasement, there must first be peace. Appeasement is the act of offering concessions to maintain peace.
Diplomacy, on the other hand, has no such restriction. Diplomacy is the art of intercession and negotiation. It can be a trade agreement or a peace agreement. It is not conditioned upon military victory, economic performance, or anything other than two parties coming together to negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement.
Joe Lieberman, George W. Bush, and John McCain forgot to check their dictionaries before going off half-cocked today. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Bush is illiterate, but it’s a pity that it has infected Senators McCain and Lieberman with an infection as rapid as the rise of the SARS virus.
II. What they said:
George W. Bush
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
McCain takes it one step further:
“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,’’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’
(Note to John McCain: The hostage release was not anything that Reagan did or didn’t do. The hostages were released about an hour after Reagan’s inauguration, and was timed to humilate Carter, mostly because Carter would not engage in any form of discussion with them, choosing instead to launch a failed rescue operation and then ignore them.)
Finally, the pile-on by Joe “hawk-boy” Lieberman:
President Bush got it exactly right today when he warned about the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is imperative that we reject the flawed and naïve thinking that denies or dismisses the words of extremists and terrorists when they shout “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and that holds that — if only we were to sit down and negotiate with these killers — they would cease to threaten us.
Because somehow, words become terrorism and war and diplomacy is appeasement.
III. John McCain was for diplomacy before he was against it.
Two years ago, when interviewed by James P Rubin, Senator McCain said this:
I asked: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”
McCain answered: “They’re [Hamas] the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”
During a follow-up conference call with bloggers, he added the following embellishment:
In a reference to Obama’s declared willingness to meet with the leader of Iran, McCain said:
“I think [it] is an unacceptable position, and shows that Senator Obama does not have the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation’s security.”
Yet, I could find no references to McCain’s objection to Iran President Ahmadinejad’s visit to the US last year, nor any objection to Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University during that same visit. Not one press release. Not one public speech. Nothing. Was that visit not “talking”? Why isn’t Columbia held to the same standard?
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The fact is that there was no political capital to be gained by giving attention to it. President Bush and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain are for democracy until they’re against it. In other words, they’re for democracy as long as the elected party is one they agree with. The Palestinians elected their government, which includes Hamas. It’s democratic, like it or not. The Iranians elected Ahmadinejad in a democratic election, like it or not. John McCain and George Bush do not get to pick and choose the democracies they like. Well, maybe they do, but it exposes the sock puppet argument about the conflict in Iraq being about making Iraq into a democracy. They’ll be for Iraq as long as they agree with the leadership, just like they were for Pakistan until the recent elections put people they don’t like into power.
The fundamental conflict here is not about appeasement. It is about how Republicans pervert ideas like diplomacy into appeasement. It’s about how they make democratic processes into wars.
Refresh your palate with a bit of Joe Biden, straight out of a Senate session and outraged at Bush’s illiteracy:
“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”
and this:
Biden noted that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both suggested that the United States ought to find a way to talk more with its enemies.
“If he thinks this is appeasement, is he going to come back and fire his own cabinet?” Biden asked. “Is he going to fire Condi Rice?”
As a final thought point, consider John McCain’s surrogate Joe Lieberman’s statement yesterday with regard to his feelings on bombing Iran:
BENNETT: Listen, I give her credit. She has found her…three things. She’s found her voice. He is very much in the background now, it’s not this, you know, ventriloquial thing, it’s definitely her voice.
LIEBERMAN: That’s true.
BENNETT: And Joe, you know, this is my style. This is a girl who puts on her pearls, goes down, throws down a shot of liquor and bombs Iran, you know. This is…lookout Mrs. Bennett, this is my kind of girl.
LIEBERMAN: Hehehe, it does have an appeal to it.
Diplomacy = Progress toward peace. Why doesn’t John McCain want peace?
Food for thought.
Technorati Tags: diplomacy, appeasement, democracy, iran, iraq, israel, bush, illiteracy, lunacy, mccain=hawk
Why the war has to end NOW
Because children are dying, and worse yet, learning the ways of their elders, and all the while, many are still afraid to look. If they looked, maybe it would end.
Dick Cheney: Pieces of Iraq…
Via Momocrats:
Listen as he asks and answers the question “How many dead Americans is Saddam worth?…Not very many.” Of course now, we have over 4,000 dead Americans proving the lie.
I’m really tired of politicians that say what’s convenient at that moment and turn it on its head when it’s not. Kind of like slapping down MoveOn.org in a conversation with rich donors. Yes, MoveOn.org, the organization that saved Bill Clinton’s presidency and gave Hillary Clinton the opportunity to be a Senator and candidate instead of letting her become just another trophy wife of a disgraced politician. That MoveOn.org, now the target of her disdain.
Donate to MoveOn so we can get on with the business of sending John McCain back to the Senate and a great Democrat to the White House.
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