This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

  • The Pentagon is not your friend

    The other day, I wrote about “the military’s greatest advocate”, Virginia Senator James Webb and his hearings seeking a freeze on military pay and compensation. Today, the Washington Post reports that he has some fellow travelers in that regard.

    Congress has been so determined to take care of troops and their families that for several years running it has overruled the Pentagon and mandated more-generous pay raises than requested by the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. It has also rejected attempts by the Pentagon to slow soaring health-care costs — which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said are “eating us alive” — by raising co-pays or premiums.

    Now, Pentagon officials see fiscal calamity.

    In the midst of two long-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials are increasingly worried that the government’s generosity is unsustainable and that it will leave them with less money to buy weapons and take care of equipment.

    Yeah, now there’s a problem. After a year of spending as much money as fast as they can to shove a liberal agenda down America’s throat, suddenly we can’t pay for the actual things government should do – like provide for the common defense. And what’s first on the chopping block? Military compensation. I don’t see anyone mentioning how we spend too much money on medicare or food stamps. There’s no mention of the bloated federal bureaucracy regarding the useless-ass Education Department. No one is suggesting that we slash the redundancy in the Commerce Department, or the utter idiocy of the EPA.

    Nope they head straight for the pocketbooks of the troops and their families.

    Well, actually, they targeted military retirees and Social Security recipients this year when there was no cost of living increase for those groups this year, which means when the “Obama tax cut” expired, military retirees and Social Security recipients actually experienced a drop in their pay. So the military is next. Can’t cut the pay of bureaucrats or welfare recipients can we? Nope, they complain, whereas the military doesn’t and seniors are so senile, they won’t even notice.

    I warned back in 2008 that Obama would slash military compensation, but nimrods like IAVA and Vote Vets declared that in the first year of his administration, Obama has been better to veterans than any other president, and I’ll concede that – but just like his “tax cut” last year, it was smoke and mirrors. We were set up, we got complacent and now we’re going to get screwed. And IAVA and VoteVets will still rest their support of Obama on his first year in office.

  • Damon vs. Reickhoff in “The Green Zone”

    As we pointed out in an earlier post, Paul Reickhoff, the Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) has gone totally Hollywood by engaging in a public cat fight with Miley Cyrus. That was before I realized that Reickhoff had a part in a Matt Damon film.

    Last night, our buddy, Greyhawk, sent us this clip from the movie “Green Zone” in which Matt Damon spends a few minutes berating Reickoff.

    The first thought that ran through my head after watching the clip was; “So I guess this didn’t require any real acting ability for Reickhoff – being an incompetent dickhead comes natural. The audition must’ve been a breeze for him.”

    I’m glad that they kept some of the realism that really counts in the movie. But I still won’t see it.

  • Paul Reickoff attacks teenage girl

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    Paul Reickoff, the executive director of IAVA, pictured above, couldn’t get angry at the terrorists and insurgents that were maiming and disfiguring his troops in Iraq, but he’s finally found an enemy (who isn’t named Bush) he can get mad at – a seventeen year old girl.

    Apparently there’s some kind of social media contest for a million bucks, and, of course, I hope the veterans win – but somehow, because Miley Cyrus is competing the contest, she hates veterans. Just rollover this link and you’ll see the original title of Reickhof’s post was “Miley Cyrus Hates Veterans” (the URL was the title while Reickhof was typing it, but he must’ve thought better of it before we get to read it).

    Here’s a screen shot of the URL, in case Paul changes it;

    reickhoff-beats-up-on-little-girls

    I guess friendly competition isn’t something Paul Reickhoff, who has apparently immersed himself in the Hollywood culture, is familiar.

  • IAVA co-founder, Phil Carter, hit by Gitmo bus

    Some of you who were around TAH last year, might remember that TSO tore up the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America “scorecard” of the Senate which was created and manipulated to make us believe that Barack Obama was better for veterans than John McCain. Then TSO found that one of the co-founders of IAVA, Phil Carter, was the Obama campaign’s veteran advisor, and I busted the IAVA trying to cover up that fact when TSO exposed them.

    Oh, yeah, Phil Carter was also the guy who came out to meet Matthis Chiroux Liam Madden when Chiroux Madden delivered IVAW’s list of demands to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year. In addition to the “scorecard” scam and stroking the IVAW, Carter was working for the Obama Campaign while he wrote a regular column at the Washington Post’s Intel Dump. Phil Carter parlayed those little stunts in service to Obama into a job position at the Pentagon, the Deputy Assistant secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.

    Well, according to the New York Times, Phil Carter is the latest casualty of the Guantanamo bus;

    Phillip Carter, who was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, resigned last Friday because of “personal issues,” a Pentagon official said. Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment and no other reasons were given for his departure.

    Mr. Carter, 34, a lawyer and an Army adviser to the Iraqi police in Baquba in 2005 and 2006, was in charge of veterans outreach in President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

    Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged that it will not be able to close the prison by Jan. 22, the self-imposed deadline Mr. Obama announced immediately after taking office.

    Mr. Carter has also left in the middle of the administration’s efforts to prosecute some of the Guantánamo detainees and find a location in the United States to house perhaps 50 to 100 terrorism suspects indefinitely. The Cuba prison now has 215 detainees.

    Noah Schachtman writes;

    I just got off the phone with Carter. “I know this is a Washington cliche, but sometimes the cliches are true,” he tells me. “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”

    Yeah, Phil, everyone else lies about “personal issues” but in your case it’s true – just you. This on the heels of Greg Craig’s personal issues. I hope Carter feels that all of his underhanded misuse of his veteran status was worth it. I’ll be watching to see what job he scores in the 2012 campaign.

  • Maddow blames “right wing” for Peters

    Rachel Maddow, whose show on MSNBC is viewed by fewer people than live in my house, took the time the other day to blame LTC Ralph Peters’s stupid rant on Fox News on Sunday over imprisoned Bowe Berdahl’s video on the entire right. IAVA’s Paul Reickhoff is interviewed and, to his credit, doesn’t engage in the partisan hackery of Maddow;

    Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

    Maddow takes the time to quote Michelle Malkin and disparages her for describing Peter’s rant as “tough words” – somehow that’s evidence of a broader conspiracy against our troops. Actually, I think Ms. Malkin was showing uncharacteristic restraint.

    I wonder where Maddow was when the famous left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga commented on American contractors who were killed in Iraq aqnd their bodies hung from a bridge with his famous “F*** ’em“.

    In fact, some of us saw evidence of Maddow having an effect on the nutroots yesterday when a Left wing blogger accused the milblogs of supporting Peters’ statement. The truth is that the milblogs have been mostly silent on it, there is no support for Peters among the milblogs or even the Right blogs.

    Maddow, true to her character, makes a mountain out of a mole hill. The left would be wise to do their research before they go off half-cocked.

  • Buying the veteran vote

    Everybody is slobbering all over themselves because President Obama has finally kept two campaign promises to veterans. You can just hear the lust in Paul Reickhoff’s words as he praises the President for his new plan veteran health care in the Huffington Post this morning;

    Today, President Obama has taken action on two key campaign promises to America’s veterans–and two of IAVA’s top legislative priorities for 2009. Advance funding VA healthcare and an overhaul of military and VA recordkeeping will eliminate two of the most significant bureaucratic hurdles that keep veterans from the healthcare and benefits they have earned. Veterans nationwide applaud the Administration for making veterans and their families a priority. And we look forward to continuing to work together on the many other issues facing today’s veterans, including psychological injuries, unemployment and homelessness.

    In the comments section of that article, a HuffPo reader reminds Reickhoff that Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into caring for veterans with this link to our post last month. Initially, the administration had planned on funding our health care on the backs of veterans and their insurance companies. But then they discovered how big of a voice veterans have in this country.

    Yesterday, Mr. Wolf from Blackfive emailed me this CNN link about how an “overtired” staffer accidentally forwarded an email discussion about the president’s schedule to the media.

    The last line that CNN quotes is pretty telling;

    In another exchange, one staffer recommended nixing a line about Obama meeting with leaders from the Veterans Service Organizations and Military Service Organizations since the president was now meeting with them before his remarks in an event closed to the media.

    “Can we keep it and just change it to say before. Its good for us to say we are meeting with them,” another replied.

    In other words; “Let’s fool them into thinking we care about veterans”.

    Michelle Malkin picked it up and said this about it;

    “It’s good for us to say we are meeting with them.”

    If this were Bush, of course, the media would pound his administration for cynically exploiting a meeting with veterans for political expediency.

    But since it’s Obama, he’s just “achieving another moment.”

    Actually, it much worse than that – Obama is buying veterans’ votes. If Obama really cared about veteran health, he wouldn’t let us fall behind in the military technology race by cutting weapons programs like he is planning to do with the defense budget. And he certainly wouldn’t have been so adamant about billing service-connected treatment to veterans’ insurance companies.

    Yeah, the HuffPoians are writing over there that Obama only “floated” the idea, but that’s not the way the story goes.

    Emanuel and Obama told the VSO reps that they wouldn’t budge on it – until they heard your voices. And when the Administration finally capitulated, Obama wasn’t even in the room – he sent in Emanuel to tell the VSO reps that the proposal was to be withdrawn. I guess he didn’t have the guts to admit he was wrong and tried to screw veterans to the wall.

    Don’t get me wrong, I applaud Obama’s support for veterans, but I’m not going to be sucked in. There’s another shoe to drop, and I’m just waiting for it.

    ADDED: Pat Dollard is on to IAVA, too, and finds Soros money.

  • Here it comes

    My regular readers might remember that back in January, I wrote that the Democrats were coming for veterans’ earned benefits at this post;

    A new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows why some military retirees and veterans could face higher out-of-pocket costs if the Obama administration and Congress take bold moves to reform the U.S. health system and to make federal health programs more efficient.

    Among 115 “options” presented, though not endorsed, in the CBO report, several focus on raising Tricare out-of-pocket costs for retirees and one targets families. Others would tighten access to VA hospitals and clinics, or raise VA health fees, for veterans with no service-connected conditions.

    Well, making one of my countless daily stops at Blackfive, I see that they’ve started dropping hints that it’s coming. By “they” I mean General Black Beret himself;

    Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance, but was told by lawmakers that it would be “dead on arrival” if sent to Congress.

    No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama opposing the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration. The groups also noticed an increase in “third-party collections” estimated in the 2010 budget proposal—something they said could only be achieved if the VA started billing for service-related injuries.

    Personally, I’d like to see the list of veterans groups that wrote letters to Obama. In February I warned about more chatter from the CBO;

    J. Michael Gilmore, assistant director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified that by increasing fees for military health care and restructuring pay raises, the Pentagon could save about $111 billion between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2026.

    The House Budget Committee’s ranking Republican, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, agreed that personnel costs were a problem. “DoD’s health care spending is increasing at an unsustainable rate,” he said.

    And back in December, John Murtha was making noise about cutting health care expenses, too;

    But he said the military could find savings by reforming its healthcare system, addressing military compensation, and reducing operations and maintenance costs.

    But it’s inevitable at this point – they can’t afford to provide health care they promised to veterans but they want to give health care to everyone. Democrats know that national health care is futile, yet they’re going to force the square peg into the round hole any-damn-way. And guess who gets to take it in the ass first.

    Veterans and the military always take it in the ass for the Democrats – and then a Republican comes along, tries to rebuild the system, and the liberals cry about “massive defense spending”. And then when the clowns get back in charge, they begin dismantling the military again. Those goofballs who voted for Obama are going to begin to wish for Bush to be back. Well, not the ones who didn’t get the benefits any way.

    Yeah, if Bush had made noises about cutting the VA they’d be screaming from the rooftops – but this gets a little blurb in the back water pages of CNN. I wonder how some of those VSOs who were “excited” about Shinseki are feeling now. But those of us with memories beyond last week know it was inevitable that Shinseki was going to screw us to the wall.

  • IAVA’s leadership is not nonpartisan [Jonn]

    You may have noticed that we’ve had a hard-on for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association in the past few weeks. I guess I started it this time when I emailed the Executive Director, Paul Reickhoff and asked him where I could find a written copy of his criticism of the Obama Administration’s and Congress’s plan to begin cutting health care benefits for veterans.

    Of course, I was being facetious because I knew that no such published criticism existed. See, Reickhoff wrote criticism of the Bush administration bi-weekly for the Huffington Post during those years, I was asking for proof that Reickhoff was nonpartisan as he claimed. That endeavor was in vain, however.

    In his usual characteristic condescending and smarmy tone, Reickhoff wrote back that I should check the IAVA FAQ page for their position on veteran health care and that future communications should be sent to his civilian media relations chick.

    Since our email exchange, Reickhoff did an interview with the Virginian Pilot in which he claims that IAVA’s current position on the Post-9-11 GI Bill for veterans is that they support spending caps. What kind of veteran organization would support spending caps? Well, since that’s the way that the Obama Administration is going with their policy towards veterans, I can only guess that a partisan veteran organization would support caps on veteran benefits. Especially since IAVA put such a high value on the new GI Bill that their Senate scorecard relied heavily on how Senators supported that GI Bill. Suddenly, gob smacked by reality, they support spending caps on it.

    The story has disappeared from the V-P, but it remains on Military.com for the time being.

    By the way, the article says that the American Legion also supports spending caps, but that’s not true. No other veteran organization supports spending caps on ANY veterans benefit except IAVA.

    Here’s a screen capture of the part that refers to Reickhoff’s interview in case Military.com disappears that one, too;
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