George W Bush: Incompetent-in-Chief
Speaking of veterans’ mental health issues and treatment, some travesties:
- Tragic, inexcusable:
- Spending 40 of the last 80 months deployed in Iraq, sometimes with as little as 6 months between deployments.
- Deployments stretched from 12 to 15 months.
- Delays of delivery of critical, life-saving equipment for no apparent reason.
- In one division, 52 soldiers killed in action, 270 listed as non-fatality casualties, 2 members MIA, rates of death and injury more than four times the rate of other, more rested units.
- Mental health issues, including alcoholism, spousal abuse, and attempted suicide.
- Worst of all, some soldiers had to take second jobs upon their return to base, like delivering pizza to supplement their income.
- Unforgivable, outrageous:
- Officers’ denial of mental health issues, claiming instead that they must be ‘faking it’ in order to be deemed unfit for combat, essentially undoing the work of the soldiers’ treating health professionals.
- Soldiers seeking treatment from civilian doctors because they fear that base doctors would collude with officers to keep them from getting treatment.
- An overall increase in diagnoses of PTSD, depression and alcohol-related disorders.
- Soldiers deployed more than once risk a more than 60% likelihood of screening positive for stress-related disorders.
Portent of things to come:
…an investigation by VFA has revealed that [soldiers] who recently returned from Iraq must wait for up to two months before a single appointment can be scheduled…
Imagine that. And then will he feign outrage when one of these stress-traumatized exhausted soldiers breaks with reality and shoots his legally-obtained weapon into a crowd of people? The self-justification for this must be right along the same lines of whatever delusion he created to justify letting people drown in New Orleans after the levies broke. I’ve always wondered about that. Did those cries for help from the hospitals and folks trying to rescue people stranded in their attics fall on deaf ears, much like this? I can almost see his smirk now, imagining a pep talk.
Commander-in-chief to the troops: Thank you so very much, young men, for your dedicated service to our country, to a cause that you didn’t ask for but took on anyway. Don’t expect decent pay, or support, or medical help from us, because we’re too busy “surging”. We appreciate you.
Immoral. Avaricious. Evil.
The VA is a perfect example of what a single payer system would look like in this country. Got that, Ralph Nader?
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