Next Time a Levee Breaks, Be a Veteran

[underpants]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/next-time-a-levee-breaks_b_42531.html

Can't help but notice the alacrity with which the President and the Secretary of Defense have responded to the scandal at building 18 of Walter Reed Hospital. Within days of the publication of the Washington Post's series on the appalling conditions in the outpatient facility, the Secretary of the Army had been forced to resign, two heads of the facility had been fired in two days, and an indpendent bipartisan commission was about to be appointed to look into the matter, alongside investigations by committees in both houses of Congress.

By contrast, of course, when Army Corps-designed and -built levees and floodwalls breached in dozens of places and resulted in the flooding of an American city, resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless, we saw: stonewalling by the Corps and silence from the President and Congress. There have been several independent forensic engineering studies of the disaster, and their own 600-page mea cupla, but no in-depth hearings on the disaster (as opposed to the response) in Congress, and no independent commission. It's hard to know the exact number of wounded vets affected by the deplorable state of Building 18, but it appears to be in the high hundreds or, at most, the low thousands. The difference in the two sets of responses speaks volumes about the difference in the political clout of veterans and New Orleanians.

[sarge43]

1. Ah, for the record many of those abandoned

New Orleanians are veterans. And it isn't that the conditions at WR and other military hospitals were any deep dark secret. Those conditions were also ignored for years.

Finally, you heard here first. This panel will issue its report and nothing much will result.

Just how much political clout did Nam vets have concerning Agent Orange?

The principal reason WR is getting any attention is it's a big club for the Dems to beat up the Repubs.

[Lisa]

3. I wondered how many of the frail older men I saw in the Katrina footage

... were WWII, Korea, or Vietnam vets.

[noamnety]

2. I commented on the blog

and also had a brief email exchange with Harry Shearer after that was posted.

There was a second post as well that I thought I submitted, but it never showed up. :shrug:

I was hoping for an apology, or at least an admission on HP from him that maybe he had been mistaken about the care the veterans have gotten, or mistaken about their clout, or some kind of admission that the administrations' knowledge of the veterans' plight predated Katrina by years. In the email, I mentioned Depleted Uranium, and Agent Orange ... he didn't disagree with anything in my email, he said, except for the term Katrina survivor (as opposed to something acknowledging that the problem was a failure of government, not a natural disaster).

I am disappointed there's not any sort of retraction on the blog; it was written (as was my comment there) before the additional stories started pouring forth, but anyone with any contact with veterans could have told him it wasn't limited to Walter Reed, and firing a few key people isn't going to fix a budget problem any more than getting rid of Rumsfeld was going to magically produce a winning strategy for a war with no objective.