President Photo-Op Disses The Troops

I see a photo like this, and all I can think of, barring impeachment, is this.

And I wonder if Dubya spoke with this brave soldier to find how he lost his hand and his forearm. Was it from a rocket launcher? Sniper fire? An IED made from munitions that Rumsfeld didn’t send over enough troops to secure after the war began?

When you’re done taking up space in the White House, Dubya, you’ll head back to your “ranch” in Crawford, Texas, presumably to imagine some memoirs that someone else will write for you (though it would look odd for you to do this unless your library has been approved at SMU or someplace else, though I suppose that would be appropriate for you).

This article in the Washington Post by Ann Scott Tyson brings us details that President Stupid Head is trying to gloss over, including these lowlights…

More than 25,000 service members have been wounded in the two wars -- nearly half seriously enough that they cannot return to duty within 72 hours.

…

More than 90 percent of the time, for example, the Army did not meet its 40-day time limit for completing physical evaluation boards, as the number of cases increased from 9,000 in 2001 to more than 15,000 in 2005, the report found. In 43 percent of cases, the Army did not meet its 30-day goal for processing medical evaluation boards.

The investigation (that discovered all this), ordered last April by then-Army Secretary Francis Harvey and completed March 6, involved interviews with 650 soldiers, civilians and leaders at 32 Army posts in the United States and overseas.

Seventy percent of the medical hold unit leaders reported that they did not have adequate personnel assigned, affecting their ability to "provide soldiers the level of attention and support they required to complete their medical care," the report said. More than half said their staffing was "inadequate for them to execute their mission."

Especially worrisome, the medical hold commanders reported, was the lack of behavioral-health specialists who could help identify soldiers with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or suicidal behavior.

The need for such specialists was underscored in a study published yesterday in the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine.

It said that 25 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans seen at Veterans Affairs health-care facilities were found to have mental health problems, and an additional 6 percent had "psychosocial or behavioral problems." It was one of the largest studies to date of veterans from the wars.

The youngest veterans, ages 18 to 24 -- who also make up a large proportion of the total -- were at the greatest risk for mental health problems and post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found.

And by the way, here is another example of a Repug (now happily gone from Congress, along with a few others) “supporting our troops.”

I’m really going to digress briefly and point out that I read a fine column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. the other day in the Inquirer where he was angered because he thought (correctly, I believe) that, through the utter shallowness and relentlessness of its lies, particularly pertaining to the U.S. Attorney firings (Pitts must have watched GSA Administrator Lurita Doan’s testimony before the Waxman House Committee in which she made an utter fool of herself), the message Bushco communicates to us over and over again is that it thinks we’re stupid.

And I thought to myself, you’re just realizing this now?

Update 4/5/07: Apparently, Doan did worse than that; we'll see.

That to me is the message communicated by this photo from Dubya. He probably stood with this soldier for all of about five seconds, long enough for him to frame the pose, allow the camera shutter to open and the flash to appear, and then move on.

He thinks we’re all idiots, ladies and gentlemen, just like him. The conclusion is inescapable.

And concerning Iraq, the fine folks at Think Progress bring us this to let us know how we have ended up in this mess, with "The Decider" leading us down the road to ruin (and here are the latest lies from Dubya on Iraq, “hot off the presses”).