Bush Does It Again! Promotes a Surgeon General With Extremely Questionable Skills And Agenda

What? Bush hire someone with an agenda (which is always totally supposed to promote only the benefits to the Bushies? You must be joking! [Or you're getting an early start on raising the blood alcohol as high as... well, quite possibly, NOT as high as the president's. Note too I refrain from past tense.

Here's a Buzzflash editorial on Dubya's next ass clown.:

Dr. James Holsinger was tapped by President Bush Thursday to be the nation's next Surgeon General. Sure enough, Holsinger's record is mired with incompetence, zealous conservatism, and, of course, sizable campaign contributions to Republicans.

As Chief Medical Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs under Bush's father, Dr. Holsinger was neglecting our vets long before Walter Reed made it fashionable. A government investigation found "several cases in which incompetence and neglect led to the deaths of patients." Dr. Holsinger was forced to admit blame for the deaths of six patients in less than a year at a single Chicago hospital alone.

But the problems weren't limited to Chicago. In a Wyoming, a patient scheduled for surgery for a treatable cancer died after he was ignored for 45 days following the resignation of the staff urologist over a contract dispute. Thirty VA hospitals were found to have "high numbers of patient complications and other indicators of substandard care."

It gets worse as you read on, including the Bushies' standard moralist homophobia.

Which leads us ever to the burning question, "Why Do George Bush AND Dr. Holsinger Hate Our Soldiers? And no, this is neither rhetorical nor mere sarcasm. The troops have had plenty enough trouble with the White House eager to veto a slight raise for American soldiers.

So Much For Our Military Veterans

From Campaign for America's Future (the blog), and like all things Bush, it ain't pretty and it's failing miserably:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales isn't the only Bush cabinet official worrying about his job.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, deemed "a Brownie situation" by Sen. Claire McCaskill, is also worrying as the Walter Reed scandal continues to unfold.

Trying to get ahead of the knives, Nicholson launched a (wee bit belated) review of 1,400 VA medical facilities, in an attempt to show he's on top of things.

The review was released yesterday, finding more than 1,000 incidents of subpar conditions -- including bug infestations, suicide risks and asbestos.

The spin from Nicholson's crew of hacks? Nothing to worry about!

From the W. Post:

VA officials said ... that the department's $519 million maintenance budget this year should address the "shortcomings."
For the moment, let's leave aside the question of whether there actually are sufficient funds available to fix problems.

Nicholson's own argument is, in essence, that while these problems have festered for two years on his watch, he's been sitting on the funds that could have addressed them.

These folks really inspire us to trust them, don't they? ::urp::

For Halliburton, There Is No Such Thing As "Too Skanky"

As if Halliburton hasn't done enough to American taxpayers and soldiers - and the White House hasn't done way more than enough FOR Halliburton - comes two "way past low" additions to Halliburton's resume:

1) Someone at the White House (could it possibly be Vice President Dick Cheney who just happened to be Halliburton's CEO just before he went to Washington and started handing over the Treasury to them?) pressured the Army to privitize health care for sick and wounded GIs, which meant much of Walter Reed patient care got entrusted to Halliburton which (for a company willing to double-and-triple bill American taxpayers to serve spoiled food to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan) helped create the crisis at Walter Reed and similar GI health institutions (Hat tip to Prairie Weather)

2) Halliburton, already avoiding paying taxes here by incorporating in the Cayman Islands while collecting tens if not hundreds of billions in U.S. defense contracts is now going to set up its base of operations in Dubai (a very strange country filled with people who are NOT U.S. friendly) to escape MORE taxes AND try to evade subpoenas for all the crap it's done in its U.S. contracts

Thoughts On The Right's Huge Concern For Poor Scooter Libby While They Yawn At Abuse of Troops

If there's one thing we've all witnessed over and over and over again this week - besides the clip of the Florida medical examiner hinting we're not done with the titillating details of Tits-for-Brains Anna Nicole Smith - is that the far right Bushie loyalists have sobbed over poor, poor, poor Scooter Libby. They wail about:

• What a terrible miscarriage of justice has been done to him
• How a great patriot like Libby should never have to spend a moment in jail
• That the American people owe Libby a momentous debt of gratitude and that they should demand the jury's guilty verdicts against him be set aside, then carry the man in their arms to the White House where the Medal of Freedom can be bestowed upon him
• That the jury is treasonous for what they did
• That this is all the result of an evil plot hatched by Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame themselves and it's Wilson-Plame who deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail
• Bush should pardon Libby immediately because it's what God wants

Gag me with a spoon! To say this again and again and again while they yawn and ignore the travesty of troop care by the Bush Administration - insisting only that this is hardly Mr. Bush's fault but taking no interest in the matter beyond that - while they work themselves into a righteous frenzy about poor millionaire Scooter Libby is really too much.

Go back and read the piece from Bob Herbert - "Lift The Curtain" - I just snipped from as well as some of the other posts I've had up in the last few weeks on the subject of troop care and abuse (and I first started posting about this more than two years ago; amazing that I could know about it while the Bush Administration and Pentagon and those heading Walter Reed, right there in Washington and their job TO know, did not...).

Then tell me which is the more important situation: poor Scooter Libby or men and women who have lost brain function, limbs, organs, and their lives for a cooked war and then rate nothing but squalor and poverty once they return home.

Bob Herbert: "Lift The Curtain"

Thanks to JP at Welcome to Pottersville, we get to read this important op/ed by Bob Herbert of The New York Times related to the hardly-new revelation that the Bush Administration treats our troops like crap:

Neglect, incompetence, indifference, lies.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president’s office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration’s moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush’s catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for “hillbilly armor” — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

Fellow soldiers cheered when the question was raised, and others asked why they were being sent into combat with antiquated equipment. The defense secretary was not amused. “You go to war with the Army you have,” he callously replied, “not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Have we forgotten that while most Americans have sacrificed zilch for this war, the mostly uncomplaining soldiers and marines are being sent into the combat zones for two, three and four tours? Multiple combat tours are an unconscionable form of Russian roulette that heightens the chances of a warrior being killed or maimed.

[...]The administration has tried its best to keep the reality of the war away from the public at large, to keep as much of the carnage as possible behind the scenes. No pictures of the coffins coming home. Limited media access to Walter Reed.

That protective curtain needs to be stripped away, exposing the enormity of this catastrophe for all to see ...

Read the rest here at JP's place.

Paul Krugman: "Valor and Squalor"

In his Times column today, Dr. Krugman turns his ink-loaded scalpel toward the Bush-worsened debacle surrounding care for our wounded troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals. Read it all here or be satisfied with my thick sniplet:

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

Rozius has the rest.