Support Our Troops! -- Yeah, Right...

[Al in NYC]

From the NYT yesterday, 4/15:

Behind Our Backs
By PAUL KRUGMAN

As the war began, members of the House of Representatives gave speech after speech praising our soldiers, and passed a resolution declaring their support for the troops. Then they voted to slash veterans' benefits.

Some of us have long predicted that the drive to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy would lead to a fiscal dance of the seven veils. One at a time, the pretenses would be dropped — the pretense that big tax cuts wouldn't preclude new programs like prescription-drug insurance, the pretense that the budget would remain in surplus, the pretense that spending could be cut painlessly by eliminating waste and fraud, the pretense that spending cuts wouldn't hurt the middle class.

There are still several veils to remove before the true face of "compassionate conservatism" is revealed, but we're getting there.

I've always assumed that at some point the American people would realize what was happening and demand an end to the process. Now, though, I'm not so sure, and that wartime vote illustrates why.

A digression: we have entered a new stage in the tax-cut debate. Until now, the Bush administration and its allies haven't made any effort to explain how they plan to replace the revenues lost because of tax cuts. Now, however, party discipline is starting to crack: a few Republicans in the House and Senate, and many erstwhile supporters on Wall Street are beginning to notice how much we're looking like a banana republic.

That House budget was a halfhearted attempt to assuage those concerns; for the first time, the Republican leadership went beyond generalities about cutting spending to a list of specific cuts.

But the result wasn't very convincing: it still contained several dollars in tax cuts for every dollar of spending cuts. Furthermore, the list of cuts — in child nutrition, medical care for children, child-care assistance and support for foster care and adoption (leave no child behind!) — was clearly designed to suggest that the budget can be balanced on the backs of the poor, without any significant cuts in programs that benefit the middle class.

Aside from its mean-spiritedness, this suggestion is simply false: our deficits are too large, and our current spending on the poor too small, for even the most Scrooge-like of governments to offer additional tax cuts for the rich without raising taxes or cutting benefits for the middle class.

So it's not too surprising that the House budget failed to win over the doubters, though it's unclear what will happen next. In a bizarre piece of parliamentary maneuvering, wavering senators agreed to vote for a budget resolution that would allow $550 billion in tax cuts, in return for a gentlemen's agreement from Bill Frist and Charles Grassley that the actual sum won't exceed $350 billion.

I'm no expert on this, but given the underhanded tactics that were used to push tax cuts through in 2001 — the Senate's cap on the 10-year tax cut was evaded by making the whole thing expire after 9 years — I suspect that the spirit, if not the letter, of this agreement will somehow be violated.

But back to the amazing spectacle of the war's opening, when the House voted to cut the benefits of the men and women it praised a few minutes earlier. What that scene demonstrated was the belief of the Republican leadership that if it wraps itself in the flag, and denounces critics as unpatriotic, it can get away with just about anything. And the scary thing is that this belief may be justified.

For the overwhelming political lesson of the last year is that war works — that is, it's an excellent cover for the Republican Party's domestic political agenda. In fact, war works in two ways. The public rallies around the flag, which means the President and his party; and the public's attention is diverted from other issues.

As long as the nation is at war, then, it will be hard to get the public to notice what the flagwavers are doing behind our backs. And it just so happens that the "Bush doctrine," which calls for preventive war against countries that may someday pose a threat, offers the possibility of a series of wars against nasty regimes with weak armies.

Someday the public will figure all this out. But it may be a very long wait.

Hey Al, anyway you can back this up with a House resolution number? I'm not saying this isn't true, but I'd like to read the h.r. for myself.

[Ron Thorne]

I believe the bill to which the article's author refers is House Concurrent Resolution 95.

This should only take about a week to read.

Try this link:

http://www.house.gov/rules/108rule_hconres95cr.htm

[Al in NYC]

Ron is correct. The 2004 Budget bill.

Here is what U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, a member of the House Budget Committee from Bush's home state of Texas, had to say:

�gIt is shameful that less than 24 hours after the first shots were fired in Iraq, House Republicans were trying to cut $28 billion in health care and disability benefits for military veterans to pay for another huge tax cut for our wealthiest citizens�h

From those who have given the most short of death, and are the most dependent on these services, the Paralyzed Veterans of America:

"�gIt is a dark day when Congress takes the budget knife to the hard-earned benefits and health-care services earned by the veterans of this Nation to support an ill-conceived tax cut,�h said PVA President Fox. �gI find it unconscionable that a majority of the members of the House Budget Committee think it appropriate to strip benefits and health care earned on the field of battle and in defense of freedom to promote their tax cut proposal, particularly at a time when we are in the process of sending more young men and women into harm�fs way.�h

[Ron Thorne]

Here's another take on the same subject. Disgraceful!

A Warm Hand Cools Quickly

Paul Vitello

April 6, 2003

At about 1 a.m. on March 21, soon after the start of the war, members of the House of Representatives gave our troops a warm hand in the form of a resolution commending their bravery in launching Operation Iraqi Freedom.

At 3 a.m., however, by a narrow margin, the Congress flipped the finger at the future of those same troops - in the form of a budget resolution that cut $14 billion from veterans programs over the next 10 years.

In all, 215 House members voted to cut veterans' benefits, and 212 voted against it. It was part of the huge House budget resolution for 2004, and it came up at 3 in the morning because ... to tell you the truth, I don't know why it was 3. I guess the members have a lot of work to do during the day, saluting the flag, reciting the pledge, attending funeral services for constituents killed in the war.

Anyway, the main feature of the 3 a.m. budget plan was a proposed $1.4-trillion tax cut - the backbone of the Republican vision for a future of economic health, faith-based social services, privatized national parks and prisons, and more wealth for the wealthy.

The cuts in veterans benefits would be a sort of collateral damage in the service of that objective.

Other programs that would be damaged included Medicare, Medicaid, school lunches, student loans, disability compensation, environmental protection. But in the context of the then-2-day-old war - the sandstorms, the 100-degree fighting in chemical suits, the dying - it was the veterans benefit cuts that must have caused a pause among even the most radical tax-cut loonies in the House.

House members voting in favor of this resolution - and to be completely fair about this, they were all Republicans, all beholden to the tax-cut fundamentalists who hold leadership in the House, and all pretty sure their lunacy would be checked and balanced by the Senate, which has since already passed a smaller tax cut with far fewer cuts in services - knew perfectly well they wouldn't be featured on the morning news shows that day for this, um, hypocritical and slimy mugging of veterans.

There was a war going on. Every talking head, and every front page in the country, would be all war all the time. And sure enough, the House budget resolution of March 21 has received about as much attention during these weeks as the weather on Mars.

Except among those who know war. Those who know what happens to warriors after war.

"We have a history in the military of never leaving our wounded behind," said Fred Denninger of Rocky Point, one of 15 local veterans assembled Friday by Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) for a meeting about the impact of the budget resolution on veterans benefits. "But we bring them back for what? To be thrown out of the VA hospital when they get old?"

As it stands, the House budget would cut about $1 billion in medical benefits for veterans in 2004 and tighten income eligibility requirements for veterans receiving the services that remain.

Drug benefits are cut. Disability benefits are cut.

In a speech defending a $265-billion package of service cuts that included the veterans-program cuts, Rep. Jim Nussle, the Iowa Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, denounced Democrats who opposed it for being unwilling to confront "waste and abuse in this government."

Veterans groups have organized to restore these programs of "waste and abuse" that may mean medicine for an 80-year-old World War II vet or drug treatment for a 23-year-old Iraq war veteran next year.

"Cutting already under-funded veterans programs to offset the costs of tax cuts is indefensible and callous," Edward R. Heath Sr., national commander of the Disabled American Veterans organization, said in a statement last week. The Senate already has passed budget measures that would increase some veterans benefits - measures that must be reconciled with the House bill. And so, it will probably end up in a draw.

Bishop told the veterans Friday that if they mobilize - "get your posts to send letters ... " he told them, most of them VFW and Legion post commanders - the Congress probably would not cut veterans benefits $14 billion over the next 10 years.

Well, hallelujah. Maybe it will even restore benefits in the year of the war, and then bleed them off a little at a time when there is less attention being paid. Hardly anyone notices, for example, that the VA Hospital in Northport has closed one wing after another over recent years; hardly anyone notices except people who can calibrate the loss.

"I'm one of the [Northport] VA Hospital's success stories," said Jim Vaughan, a Vietnam combat veteran who attended Friday's meeting with Bishop at the American Legion Hall in Patchogue, and who credits the VA's detoxification unit and in-patient alcoholics' treatment program with saving his life in 1989. Both units have since closed. "They still have outpatient treatment," he said. "But if you go in for detox and they discharge you at night and tell you to come back the next day ... I don't know about anyone else, but if that was me I would have headed to the nearest bar."

What do you call it when political leaders hype war at every turn, but dis the warriors when no one is watching?

They call it supporting the troops.

You also can call it supporting those very wealthy campaign contributors who paid for their tax cut and want it now, dammit, to hell with everything and everyone else.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.