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After nearly 5 months away from DU, I'm back...as feisty and upset as ever over how this adiminstration is ruining our country. Here's the text of my letter to the editor of my local paper in response to Bush's request of the American people to help the troops. Feel free to copy, sign your own name and send to you own local papers. We cannot remind too many people too many times of how insidious this administration is...
Text of letter:
Following his Thanksgiving public relations exploit disguised as a top-secret trip to visit troops in Iraq, George W. Bush asked Americans to “volunteer to help military personnel and their families’ during his Saturday, November 29 radio address.
I keep hoping one day I’ll cease being amazed by the contradictions and absurdities this man articulates. While I support any measure that would provide assistance, encouragement and aid for both active and veteran military personnel and their families, I am appalled that Mr. Bush had the chutzpah to ask the American public to do what his own administration will not. Thankfully, our troops can rest assured that as a society we will collectively do what we can to support them while our president seemingly turns a blind eye to their fate.
Our troops are still facing death and danger in Iraq, months after Bush swooped Top Gun-style onto an aircraft carrier and declared victory under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Meanwhile, this is what Mr. Bush and his administration has been doing for our troops:
- Slashed nearly $200 million to programs that provides assistance to public schools serving military bases, disproportionately reducing education funding for the children of soldiers fighting in Iraq.
- Bush's latest tax cut failed to extend a child tax credit to nearly 200,000 low-income military personnel.
- Bush’s 2004 budget will result in cuts of $1.5 billion in funding for military family housing, child-care centers, barracks, hangars and office buildings. House Republicans voted down a proposal by House Democrats to restore $1 billion of those cuts.
- Bush’s administration has proposed cuts totally at least $14.6 billion over the next ten years in benefits paid by the Veteran’s Administration.
- The administration resisted support of the recently passed TRICARE legislation that prevents National Guard reservists from being cut off from health care benefits 30 days after being de-activated.
- The Bush administration waited until the 11th hour to sign a bill that kept imminent- danger pay being reduced from $225 to $150 per month, and family separation pay being reduced to $100 from $250 for soldiers being shot at in Iraq.
It’s bad enough that Mr. Bush committed American troops to fighting and dying in a fruitless war that has accomplished little more than to destroy what little infrastructure existed in Iraq, further de-stabilize an already fragile region, and put us at diplomatic odds with the rest of the globe. What’s worse is that his administration can’t – or won’t – properly provide for the men and women it has put in harm’s way.
He’s apparently leaving that up to the American people themselves. It’s a pity he and his handlers couldn’t have seen fit to do the same with the 2000 election.
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