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

Category: Veterans in politics

  • Lautenberg, Senate’s last WWII vet passes

    Lautenberg

    Regardless of what you think about his politics, or the circumstances that brought him out of retirement and back to the Senate, Frank Lautenberg’s passing marks the end of an era when nearly every member of the Senate had served in the military. Lautenberg served during World War II in the Signal Corps from 1942 to 1946. After the war, he attended Columbia University on his GI Bill, like the rest of us.

    According to the Washington Times, his replacement will be named by Republican New Jersey Governor Christie. For some reason everyone thinks that Christie will name a Republican, but I wouldn’t put any money on it given Christie’s recent behavior.

    The attention of the political world now turns to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who is responsible for naming an interim replacement to serve of the remainder of Mr. Lautenberg’s term.

    Mr. Christie is likely to tap a fellow Republican, cutting into the 55 seat majority that Democrats hold in the Senate.

    Regardless, the world has changed with Lautenberg’s passing.

  • Jeff Denham holds DoD and VA feet to the fire

    Someone dropped off a link to our Facebook page to a video of Congressman Jeff Denham, an Air Force veteran representing California’s 10th District in the hearings this past week about the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs inability to gin up a system by which they can seamlessly share veterans’ records.

    He begins by asking why in the decades since he left the service does he still have to maintain his little yellow shot records card when as a businessman he had all of his inventory and business on a computer network. He’s correct in his conclusion – not that the VA and DoD CAN’T do it – they just don’t WANT to do it.

    Thanks for being our voice, Mr. Denham.

  • Gabriel Gomez for Senate

    There’s a real deal SEAL running in the special election in Massachusetts’ Senate race this year. Yes, I wrote our buddy, Don Shipley about his creds, because that’s the environment we’re operating in these days.

    According to the Washington Post, he’s the son of Colombian immigrants as well as a local Boston businessman;

    The GOP is facing an uphill climb in the race for Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s old seat. Several high-profile Republicans declined to run, leaving the party to turn to lesser-known candidates. Last week, state Rep. Dan Winslow became the first Republican to enter the race.

    The primary is April 30, and the general election is slated for June 25. Candidates have until Feb. 27 to collect 10,000 petition signatures to get on the primary ballot.

    I got several emails this morning asking about his credentials and just got an answer back from Don…so however you are led.

  • Chuck Hagle for SecDef?

    COB6 emailed that he just heard that Chuck Hagle is being considered for Secretary of Defense. So I checked the news and The National Journal is reporting that he’s being considered for either Defense or State;

    Hagel has been critical of the current Republican Party since leaving office in 2008, even backing Democratic Senate candidate Bob Kerrey in this cycle. In 2008, Hagel traveled to Iraq with then-Sen. Obama during the presidential election.

    “Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before,” Hagel told FP in a previous interview. “You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first 8 years of the century, it was under Republican direction.”

    Before Hagle got on his bipartisan kick, I thought he was a good guy. Hagle, a Vietnam veteran, when Strom Thurmond left the Senate, helped us get National Airborne Day through the Senate. Then his office called me on my cell phone and thanked me for helping to get it through. So, even when he went insane, I still kept a warm spot in my heart for him.

    Then he started his bat shit crazy “Iraq is like Vietnam” thing and even had VoteVets supporting him. In fact, VoteVets will tell you that Haigle is the only Republican they ever supported – which is a lie because Haigle’s last election was in 2002 and VoteVets didn’t exist until 2006, but it tells you the kind of company Haigle keeps.

    Making Hagle SecDef only makes sense, since Panetta was the only Democrat SecDef since 1997, so they need another Republican in that office, and who better than an insane anti-war RINO. I’m not sure how this will work out for veterans, because Hagle always made a show of supporting veterans. He left the Army as an E-5 infantry squad leader in 2/47 Infantry, 9th ID – so we can only hope that he remembers his roots.

  • Vets go to Washington

    The Associated Press reports that nine veterans of the current wars in the Middle East are headed to Congress after their successful elections. of course, the main focus of the article is Tammy Duckworth, this blog has been sufficiently critical of Ms. Duckworth, at this point, we’ll sit back and see what she accomplishes for veterans in her tenure before we say anything else. Her record of working for veterans in the past has been weak sauce, but we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt for the time being. The other Democrat who is also a veteran going to Congress is Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard. The seven Republicans who are also veterans are;

    Ron DeSantis of Florida was a judge advocate officer in the Navy who deployed to Iraq as a legal adviser during the 2007 troop surge.
    Brad Wenstrup of Ohio was as a combat surgeon in Iraq.
    Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan served in an administrative capacity with an artillery unit in Iraq and retired after suffering a neck injury. He also served as an infantry rifleman in Vietnam.
    Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma was a combat pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    Scott Perry of Pennsylvania commanded an aviation battalion in Iraq in 2009 and 2010.
    Doug Collins of Georgia was a chaplain in Iraq.
    Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Harvard Law School graduate, was an infantry platoon leader in Iraq and then was on a reconstruction team in Afghanistan. In between, he was a platoon leader at Arlington National Cemetery.

    Regardless of their party affiliation, I’m glad to see so many veterans going to Congress, since we’ve been poorly represented lately, especially when our own have turned on us, like Lindsay Graham and John McCain.

  • Swiftboating poor Obama

    They still don’t know what the term, “swiftboating” means;

    I guess the attacks on Obama for pretending to be a ‘war president” from the various special operations troops who’ve been sticking up for the troops who are actually fighting the wars are starting to sting, because the Obama campaign has been attacking those veterans on this new webpage.

    It’s funny because their charges against these guys range from “worked on the McCain campaign” to making appearances on Fox News. They go after our friend, Larry Bailey for organizing the “Vietnam Veterans For Truth” – my first conservative rally and precursor to Gathering of Eagles.

    So, there’s really nothing surprising about the revelations on this web page. Veterans are generally conservative, and conservatives generally supported George W Bush over John Kerry or Al Gore. Duh. The webpage concludes;

    It is not surprising that the attacks these groups are launching lack any credibility. The President is committed to protecting our troops and our country’s security. The only way to mislead Americans about his record on national security is to resort to dishonest and overtly political smear campaigns that do a disservice to Americans who deserve to know the facts about the President’s record.

    The President’s record on national security and support for the troops is indeed glaring. When he took his political advisers’ advice for the Afghanistan surge instead of his generals, we know what he was thinking, and it wasn’t about national security. Supporting the troops? Really? Was that he wanted service-connected veterans to buy their own insurance? Is that why his Homeland Security Department warned the nation to watch out for crazy vets? Is that why he’s raising the cost of Tricare for veterans as a means to lower everyone else’s health care costs?

    But what I think is strange, they attack veterans who campaign against Obama for not disclosing their conservative links, but I don’t see anyone except TAH disclosing IAVA’s liberal links. In fact, we were attacked in 2008 for exposing Phil Carter, Obama campaign veteran advisor, as a founding member of IAVA. And we were attacked for connecting IAVA to Paul Rieckhoff’s first anti-conservative venture OpTruth (which was nothing more than IVAW in suits).

    And don’t get me started on VoteVets.

    So I don’t think that it’s surprising that conservatives oppose Obama, because, from what I’ve heard, liberals oppose Romney.

    Thanks to Daniel for the link to the Obama page.

  • I don’t think “swiftboating” means what you think it means

    DJ Bell sends us a link to an article about how the founder of Special Operations for America PAC, Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, is under attack from VetPAC’s Dick Klass, vice-president of VetPAC, and a retired Air Force colonel, who is questioning the character of Zinke’s service as a SEAL;

    “We heard some things about this founder,” Klass continued, referring to Zinke. “If a guy has had two combat tours and retired as a lieutenant commander, he did not have a brilliant career.”

    Klass, a former Air Force pilot with over 500 combat hours, is referring to claims by former military officials — who declined to be quoted on the record — that Zinke left the Navy SEALs acrimoniously after being accused of improprieties surrounding his travel reports in the late ‘90s.

    Yeah, Zinke returned to the SEALs after 9-11 – so those “improprieties” must’ve amounted to a popcorn fart or he never would have been allowed to come back. Klass calls the mere existence of Special Operations for America PAC “swiftboating” in reference to the swiftboat veterans’ sinking of the Kerry campaign in 2004. But, I don’t see how it could apply, since Obama isn’t a veteran and, therefore has no military record to impugn.

    I thought Klass’ name sounded familiar so I scoured our archives and TSO wrote about him during the 2008 campaign when he was spewing lies as the Co-Chair of Veterans for Obama Policy Group and hiding behind VetPAC;

    VetPac is truly a vision of nonpartisanship though. They’ve endorsed 28 candidates and only 26 are Democrats. One is a Republican. Who’s still in school. And has no chance of winning.

    I wrote about him again this last May when Klass attacked a most excellent video from Veterans For A Strong America in the Huffington Post when he also tried to use the term “swiftboating” out of context. Klass is a partisan hack who wraps himself in veteran clothing to work against veterans.

  • Gallup: Romney’s lead over Obama comes from veterans

    Politics seeps into Memorial Day news from a Gallup poll which says that Romney’s lead over Obama is mainly fueled by veterans;

    These data, from an analysis of Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted April 11-May 24, show that 24% of all adult men are veterans, compared with 2% of adult women.

    Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points. It turns out that the male skew for Romney is driven almost entirely by veterans. Romney leads by one point among nonveteran men, contrasted with the 28-point edge Romney receives among male veterans.

    Gallup blames the socialization processes that convert people into Republicans while they serve;

    Why veterans are so strong in their preference for the Republican presidential candidate is not clear. Previous Gallup analysis has suggested that two processes may be at work. Men who serve in the military may become socialized into a more conservative orientation to politics as a result of their service. Additionally, men who in the last decades have chosen to enlist in the military may have a more Republican orientation to begin with.

    I think it’s because Romney has the advantage of not having the opportunity to screw veterans yet, whereas Obama’s strategy of pumping money into the Department of Veterans Affairs while slashing healthcare at the Department of Defense while Leon Panetta takes the heat doesn’t seem to be working as he planned. Obama’s rush for the exits in Afghanistan doesn’t look to be doing him any favors either.

    Age makes little substantive difference in the vote preferences of male veterans. Those younger than 50 are roughly as likely to support Romney as are those 60 and older. Male veterans aged 50 to 59 are slightly less skewed toward Romney, but still support him by a 15-point margin.

    Time for VoteVets and IAVA to roll out their usual “non-partisan” blather to save the President skin.