{"id":30237,"date":"2012-06-04T08:46:07","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T12:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=30237"},"modified":"2012-06-04T08:46:07","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T12:46:07","slug":"more-sleight-of-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=30237","title":{"rendered":"More sleight of hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve watched with some interest this weekend while Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, entered into talks of sorts with the Vietnamese government over accounting for our 1,284 missing American service members in that country. I know there’s a political motivation, because this administration doesn’t do anything in this election year without some sort of political calculation. Panetta, the guy who spends $32,000 dollars every weekend to fly to his California villa is doing his level best to slash our defensive capabilities and tear to shreds the covenant with veterans over their healthcare. I guess they see this venture with the Vietnamese government as having no downside – they please Vietnam veterans by focusing on this issue and distracting from the defense cuts. <\/p>\n

According to Jennifer Hlad of the Stars & Stripes<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Accounting for missing servicemembers from the Vietnam War sends an important message to today\u2019s servicemembers, Panetta said: The U.S. will not stop working to fulfill the promise of never leaving a man behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So where have they been the last three non-election years? While I applaud the administration’s recent interest in the MIA\/POW issue, and I’ll certainly be pleased if it results in a final accounting of those Americans, I just think it’s funny that it wasn’t important previously, you know, before they started slashing the crap out of the defense budget.<\/p>\n

Of course, we can revel in our (veterans) issues that are finally being addressed by this administration, but we also need to be cognizant of the underlying reasons. We can also be reasonably certain that the importance of these issues will probably fall off of this administration’s radar after the election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve watched with some interest this weekend while Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, entered into … More sleight of hand<\/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":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30237","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=30237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}