{"id":28264,"date":"2012-01-10T13:14:04","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T17:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28264"},"modified":"2012-01-10T13:16:50","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T17:16:50","slug":"a-message-to-paul-rieckhoff-the-troops-arent-props","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28264","title":{"rendered":"A Message to Paul Rieckhoff: the troops aren’t props"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, has a piece in the Huffington Post today entitled “A Message to All Candidates: Our Troops Aren’t Props<\/a>“, of course, his message is just for the Republican candidates, because he’s referring to the incident last week when Corporal Jesse Thorsen spoke at a Ron Paul rally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our troops are many things to many people. Heroes, parents, diplomats, victims, villains, victors. But as the GOP Primary races roll through New Hampshire this week, there is one thing that all of America must understand they’re not: political props.<\/p>\n

And that’s not just my opinion, it’s the law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, it’s definitely not his opinion. Because, when Rieckhoff came back from Iraq in 2004, it only took him a few weeks to criticize the president on the airwaves in the form of a rebuttal following Bush\u2019s weekly presidential radio address<\/a> for the Kerry campaign. He then formed the radically anti-Bush organization, OpTruth. The board of OpTruth included our old friends Ann Wright<\/a>, Paul Bucha and Jesse Ventura.<\/p>\n

As the 2008 elections drew closer, Rieckhoff realized that OpTruth was too radical to help the Democrats, so he morphed OpTruth into IAVA and took a more sober approach to politics. that’s when they hit on the idea to establish a scorecard system for rating Senators – not surprisingly, Democrats scored better on the IAVA scorecard<\/a> in regards to veterans’ issues than did Republicans. Barbara Boxer scored better than John McCain, as did Barack Obama – you get the point.<\/p>\n

Rieckhoff closes out his HuffPo piece;<\/p>\n

So consider this is a warning and a plea to every single candidate this election year: let’s respect our troops and our democracy, and keep them out of this one–especially, if you want to be our Commander-in-Chief. If you want that job for the next four years (or eight), you should know whether it’s on the battlefields of Fallujah or Helmand, or the primaries of New Hampshire and South Carolina, our troops aren’t a prop. <\/p>\n

And they’re nobody’s toys.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess the hypocrisy of his performance art in the Huffington Post is lost on him, so, since every time I mention his name, someone sends him a link, well, I just thought that I’d help him out this election cycle. Using the troops for props for Democrats is just as bad as using them for the Republicans’ props, Paul. I have crayon drawings that I can use to illustrate this for you if you don’t quite understand it yet.<\/p>\n

I guess this post is indicative of the reason he doesn’t invite me to ball games anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, has a piece … A Message to Paul Rieckhoff: the troops aren’t props<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iava"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}