{"id":61172,"date":"2015-08-03T09:49:34","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T13:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=61172"},"modified":"2015-08-03T10:20:17","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T14:20:17","slug":"washington-post-sets-sights-on-grahams-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61172","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post sets sights on Graham’s career"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GRAHAMMILITARY_011438207870\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a> doesn’t like Lindsay Graham for some reason, so they decided to go after his military career, such as it is. I guess he retired this summer with 33 years, most of it in the Reserves (since 1988). Twenty years of that career, he was in Congress (beginning in 1995). In the 1998 campaign, he claimed that he served in Desert Storm – he was called to duty, but he never left South Carolina.<\/p>\n

He did, however, get to serve in Iraq, using the excuse that he wanted to help the Army with their detaining of prisoners after the Abu Ghraib thing;<\/p>\n

Last year, the Army awarded Graham a Bronze Star for serving on the detention task force. All told, he deployed overseas 19 times while in Congress, serving a total of 142 days, according to his personnel file.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, I’m about ready to throw my Bronze Star away. But I don’t remember any meaningful legislation coming out of the Senate in regards to detainee operations, do you?<\/p>\n

One Air Force lawyer who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 said it did not appear that Graham did meaningful work.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody who was in the war-zone billets who were doing [legal] work in Baghdad ever knew what he did,\u201d said the lawyer, who is still on active duty and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. \u201cHe was just hanging on.\u201d<\/p>\n

While in uniform, Graham was often treated like a visiting celebrity. He was featured in military news releases and posed for photographs with other units.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They also point out that Graham didn’t attend the Air War College or the Air Command and Staff College, you know like most Air Force O-6s, but he says that he was too busy being a Senator to even do the correspondence courses. But, you know, he won’t be too busy to cash those retirement checks. He claims that he was promoted because of his performance back in the early 80s at the beginning of his career, but we all know why the reserves promoted him – he was also a Senator.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Colonel Graham did a pretty good job, quite frankly, given the constraints of my day job, my ability in terms of time,\u201d Graham told The Post. \u201cI\u2019ll let people who served with me say whether or not I helped. I think I did.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t like Graham either – but because while he’s drawing his check for serving (and I use that term loosely) in the Reserves, he’s using that minimum service as moral authority to increase out-of-pocket medical costs for retirees, to change the retirement system for future service members and to slash benefits for currently-serving service members. Graham is the king of all Blue Falcons.<\/p>\n

But, the Washington Post can call me when they have a veteran on their staff of writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post doesn’t like Lindsay Graham for some reason, so they decided to go after … Washington Post sets sights on Graham’s career<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress-sucks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61172","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=61172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/61173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}