Author: onealbear

Every time I turn around, there’s a new ad from the shameless McCain campaign saying that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes if you make 42,000 dollars a year. Well, this is a big, fat, bald-faced, Republican lie and John McCain knows it. Under Barack Obama’s tax plan, your taxes are not going to go up unless you make more than 250,000 dollars. That is a quarter of a million dollars. I have made a little illustration (after the break) to show just how dramatic the difference is between the truth and a lie. My illustration shows the  difference between a stack of money that amounts to $250,000 and a stack of money that amounts to $42,000 and poses a simple question:

The United States Military is an elitist, patriarchal, hierarchical organization and had been since the time of George Washington. So why is everybody so shocked by this ward 72 business?? This is old news. Officer’s Clubs serve fine, twenty-year-old Scotch in crystal glasses with embroidered linen napkins. In an NCO club or a soldier’s bar, you’re lucky if your beer is served cold.
As a disabled veteran from another era, I can assure you that nothing much has changed. Like my father before me, I was an enlisted man, so I had to live with the consequences of low-priority veterans’ health care. I spent a couple of years in crowded, filthy, badly ventilated wards in the early 70’s at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. I spent months in the Fort Jackson Army Hospital and later, when I had complications from my service-connected disability, I suffered through many weeks in understaffed, overflowing Veterans Administration Hospitals in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina.

During most of this time, the esteemed Senior Senator from my state, Strom Thurmond was the Chairman (or the ranking minority member) of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. The conditions in VA Hospitals were horrible. Everybody knew this. It was no secret. In fact, it was sort of a standing (sick) joke about how dangerous these hospitals were.  But interestingly, no matter how deplorable the conditions in VA hospitals got, the American Legion  and the VFW fellows never held Thurmond accountable. These guys (including my father, bless his heart) would have followed Strom to hell and back as long as he stood for the preservation and purity of the White Race (cough, cough.)

I am not at all surprised by the existence of a Ward 72 at Walter Reed Hospital. Bethesda Naval Hospital probably has a super luxurious suite standing by for their congressional benefactors, too. Congress should de-fund this exorbitant outrage now! These Multi-Zillionaire Senators and Congressmen have plenty of private health insurance. Let them use it. Public funds should be used to care for Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen who have been wounded and maimed in  the line of duty.

Chapter 1. Shrubsville

A pack of sleep dogs stretch and yawn lazily under a stand of tower Oak trees as the little commute train steams out of the Shrubsville station. Spring is here. The beauty Magnolias and Azaleas are just beginning to bloom. The passengers look out of the dirt windows as clouds of brick-red dust blow across the fresh-plow fields. Red Gibson, the engineer, peers out from under the bill of his stripe cap as the train moves slowly down the wind track in the direction of Shooterville. Red is a very tradition man. He remembers the glory days of the Republic Party–the Ronald Reagan days and the Contract-With-America days– when the Democrat Party knew its place in the scheme of things. “We’ve come a long ways from Doleton and Gingrichburg,” he says to his crust old brakeman. “Imagine the gall of this new Democrat Majority–thinking they have the right to question the Decider on matters of nation security.”

Next Week, Chapter 2. Shooterville

(Here’s a preview…)

There are many passengers lined up to board the train at Shooterville, most seeking to escape the oppress heat that has come over the rust enclave, especially since the beginning of the ridicule Libby trial…

(To be continued)

I am sick to death of Barry Bonds. This guy is shameless self-promoter and a notorious cheater. Bonds’ self-serving comments yesterday in the Dominican Republic were as transparent as a tainted urine sample. Bonds doesn’t really give rat’s ass about Pete Rose and Mark McGuire. He’s thinking about Barry, Barry and Barry.
From the Associated Press:

Arriving in the Dominican Republic for the Juan Marichal Golf Classic, Bonds told reporters he expects to become baseball’s career home run leader this season. “I’m sure I’m going to break the record this year,” said the San Francisco left fielder, who needs 22 homers to surpass Hank Aaron’s mark of 755.

I sincerely hope the San Francisco management will have the courage to deny Bonds a shot at Aaron’s record in a Giants Uniform, especially in light of his most recent amphetamine embarrassment. Barry Bonds is an outrageous fraud, despite his accomplishments.

I have always thought Joe Biden was a guy who played to the crowd just a little bit too much. But yesterday, he really proved his mettle as a first-class panderer and, along the way, undoubtedly derailed whatever slim hopes he had of riding his dark DLC pony to the White House.  His comments in Columbia, South Carolina yesterday about the Confederate Battle Flag flying on the Statehouse grounds were remarkably inept and short-sighted:

“If I were a state legislator, I’d vote for it to move off the grounds — out of the state.”
Now, Joe Biden has managed to offend practically everybody in South Carolina. His now infamous November speech before a (mostly white) South Carolina Rotary Club luncheon in November was bad enough:

“My state was a slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South — there were a couple of other states in the way.”

He then repeated this absurdity to Chris Wallace on FOX news after Wallace asked if he could be competitive in South Carolina as a Northeastern liberal.

“You don’t know my state. My State was a slave state. My state was a border state. “My state is anything (but) a Northeast liberal state.”

  …implying (I guess) that he has real right-wing bigot bonafides that should be extremely attractive to unreconstructed Southerners.

Perhaps yesterday’s Confederate flag bandwagon-pander-gaffe was intended to counter the my-state-is-a-slave-state-pander-gaffe- that would certainly be typical beltway punditocracy think–but this was a deadly over-reaction. I can’t help but wonder how many beltway consultants it took to screw in that red light bulb. There is no question Joe Biden has been stroking South Carolina for years, hoping to get a leg up in the Southern Primaries. He got high marks for his eulogy of Strom Thurmond in 2002 and the Senator has been to the state dozens of times since then, trying to build an organization. But, as far is South Carolina is concerned, Joey might as well pack up his tent and his consultants and go back to the beltway because, with a single stroke of the Biden blunder blade, he has killed his chances there.

Joe should have paid more attention when they asked him to appear at this “hot-potato” rally.  (Yes, I realize that Chris Dodd chimed in too, but that is another story.) John McCain learned his lesson the hard way in the 2000 Presidential primaries about the political danger of meddling in this sticky wicket (particularly for an outsider.) Two incumbent SC governors (one Democrat and one Republican) were denied a second term simply for suggesting that it might be time to consider moving the flag from the dome.  For better or for worse, South Carolina doesn’t cotton to being told what to do by uppity Yankee Senators with an agenda–never has.

 Removing the flag from the dome of the South Carolina statehouse was a painful and difficult process. There were many creative alternatives proposed on all sides,  but the NAACP refused to sign on to any of them, so this less-than-perfect compromise is what they got and what they’ll have to live with. For now, the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia will continue to fly next to the Confederate Soldier’s monument. It is part of that monument now. There is absolutely no way the South Carolina legislature is going to revisit the flag flap again–not for a long, long time at any rate. It is no more realistic to believe (or even hope) that  South Carolina’s (very red) legislature is going to take that flag down than to believe that they are going to demolish the Confederate Statue itself.

Biden is kidding himself, anyway, if he thinks he’ll enjoy the support of Black voters in South Carolina. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson and Wes Clark (among others, probably) will leave him in the red Carolina dust. He won’t know what hit him. But one thing is certain: all of those white Rotarians and suburban moderates he was so assiduously courting are finished with him now. None of them want to be reminded again of this divisive South Carolina problem, especially by Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, from Delaware and Connecticut.

Here is my fearless prediction: If Joe Biden even manages to stay in the race until the South Carolina primary, I predict that he’ll come in fourth of fifth. Then, after his paltry single-digit performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, he will withdraw from the race.