{"id":34997,"date":"2013-04-08T11:05:23","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T15:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34997"},"modified":"2013-04-08T11:08:50","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T15:08:50","slug":"baffled-obama-supporters-in-the-veteran-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34997","title":{"rendered":"“Baffled” Obama supporters in the veteran community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Daily Beast<\/a> in which folks who backed the two elections of Obama in the veteran community are “baffled why the Department of Veterans’ Affairs isn’t doing more for veterans;<\/p>\n

\u201cI supported President Obama in both elections, but what is happening right now at VA is inexcusable,\u201d says Thomas Bandzul, a well-known advocate for veterans who is legislative counsel for Veterans and Military Families for Progress and past associate counsel for Veterans for Common Sense.<\/p>\n

Bandzul, who in 2007 worked closely with then-Senator Obama on the Lane Evans Veterans Health and Benefits Improvement Act, said he is \u201cbaffled\u201d by why the problems at the agency just keep getting worse and why Obama isn\u2019t doing more to fix it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know Shinseki on a personal level,\u201d he says. \u201cI know Allison Hickey on a personal level. They\u2019re two of the greatest people in the world. But it\u2019s time the president takes full responsibility for this failure, and takes action. This is happening on his watch.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, we warned readers<\/a> about Veteran and Military Families for Progress<\/a>, and Veterans for Common Sense<\/a> back in 2008 when we first noticed that they popped<\/a> their grimy little heads up. All they cared about was getting veterans and the troops to vote for their candidate with total disregard of what would happen. <\/p>\n

Oh, yeah, the article mentions other disillusioned veterans’ groups, but oddly enough, they don’t mention Paul Reickhoff and IAVA who are suddenly very good on the inability of the VA to do their simple job with any measure of success. But, IAVA drove hard for the hoop getting a Democrat Administration in office in 2008 & 2010. I wonder when they’re going to admit that they were wrong. At least VoteVets has been consistently pro-Obama, despite his utter failure on veterans’ issues. And, oh yeah, by the way, most of the writing staff from VoteVets now works at the VA. Well, except for a notable few who have jumped ship now that it’s sinking.<\/p>\n

There was even some disagreement among the writing staff at TAH whether an Obama Administration would screw veterans. And yes, Obama has increased spending on veterans, as the VA folks reminded me incessantly at the Milblog Conference last year, but outcome is more important than intentions. In addition to the troubles at the VA , this month, thousands of veterans are being forcibly removed from the rolls of Tricare Prime for the more user-expensive Tricare Standard, while the surplus we’ve built up in Tricare is further squandered by the Department of Defense.<\/p>\n

But, these veterans’ groups being “baffled” as to how all of this happened were more interested in getting their guy elected than they were in looking ahead at what the inevitable outcome would be. Cry me a fricken river.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Daily Beast in which folks who backed the … “Baffled” Obama supporters in the veteran community<\/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":[118,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues","category-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34997","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=34997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}