Waltzing Matilda All Over

Today's New York Times featured an editorial about the continuing disgraceful health care the Army (and by extension, our government) provides to returning wounded and half-destroyed veterans. But the Times is a leftist rag, so, yeah, we can ignore their whining. Except it's kind of hard to do that because I don't want Dick Cheney or that cute little Tokyo Rose of right wing talk radio Rush Limbaugh to support the troops more than I do. And so, it doesn't seem right to ignore the fact that it takes New York Times reporters doing an article to remind the Army that it promised to take better care of our soldiers.

I keep hearing John McCain belittle Barack Obama about the war in Iraq, apparently the ONLY war that matters, to hear the Senator from Arizona talk about it. Apparently, Obama really wants to lose the war so that he can go mess around in Afghanistan or some place. McCain reminds us every fifteen minutes or so that he was right about the surge. What about your earlier predictions, Senator? The ones about how short the war would be and about how few casualties we would take? Were you right about the surge, Senator? Well, if a politician makes enough predictions, sooner or later he'll get one right. Maybe. Besides, who would have thought that the Iraqis would shoot back? The temerity! Didn't we already bomb those overmatched Arab boys back to the stone age and deafen the hell out of them back in 1991? They probably did not even hear us coming this time.

And anyway, the soldiers coming back in tatters and flesh rags are learning a valuable lesson that the Right has been trying to get through our silly heads at least since the 70s, which is that government can't do much of anything right. As a matter of fact, government is the enemy and stands in the way of political liberty and all human progress. Government is the enemy, period. That's what our shell-shocked and limb-truncated and brains-shot-away troops are finding out as they return home to the medical care they were promised. Or not as they were promised.