Support the Troops; Save the Flag

The constant reiteration by Bush supporters about the need to Support the Troops has never made sense. People who want to bring the military home, and spare them being wounded or killed, are accused of not supporting the troops. People who want to keep them there, while never questioning whether their presence is accomplishing anything, are exposing them to lethal danger, but claim they are supporting the troops. This is crazily backward. The ‘supporters’ can’t admit that the original decision to go to Iraq may have been wrong, as that realization would mean that lives were spent in vain. And so rational analysis of Iraq is not acceptable.

So while the mantra is continually used to suppress thought, if you want to see what is behind the claim and just how the Bush administration actually doesn't support the troops, beyond not bothering to provide adequate body or vehicle armor, just read the article in today’s NY Times about how military widows are treated:

For military widows, many of them young, stay-at-home mothers, the shock of losing a husband is often followed by the confounding task of untangling a collection of benefits from assorted bureaucracies. While the process runs smoothly for many widows, for others it is characterized by lost files, long delays, an avalanche of paperwork, misinformation and gaps in the patchwork of laws governing survivor benefits.

Sometimes it is simply the Pentagon's massive bureaucracy that poses the problem. In other cases, laws exclude widows whose husbands died too early in the war or were killed in training rather than in combat. The result is that scores of families — it is impossible to know how many — lose out on money and benefits that they expected to receive or believed they were owed, say widows, advocates and legislators.

Legislators and advocates working with widows say the problems are often systemic, involving payouts by the mammoth Department of Defense accounting office and the Department of Veterans Affairs. A few widows simply fall through the cracks altogether. The consequences are hard felt: they run up credit card bills, move in with relatives to save money, pull their children from private schools, spend money on lawyers or dedicate countless frustrating hours to unraveling the mix-ups.

"We have had more of these cases than I wish to know," said Ann G. Knowles, president of the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers, which helps veterans and widows with their claims.

Meanwhile back in Congress, fully attuned to rectifying problems pressing on the nation, we find they are planning to spend four days debating the need to safeguard our flag from public burnings and desecrations too horrible to contemplate. Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Post skewers this absurd waste of time:

The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year.

The number has increased to four, from three.

The naive among us may have trouble appreciating how four flag-burning episodes would constitute a constitutional crisis. But the men and women of the Senate, ever alert to emerging threats, are on the case.

"I think of the flag as a symbol of what veterans fought for," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said as he opened the debate yesterday, "what they sustained wounds for, what they sustained loss of limbs for and what they sustained loss of life for."

"I think it's important to focus on the basic fact that the text of the First Amendment, the text of the Constitution, the text of the Bill of Rights is not involved," Specter argued. The Judiciary Committee chairman did not explain how he could add 17 words to the Constitution without altering its text.

Fortunately, the Senate will have plenty of time to discuss that matter. The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country. Unfortunately, the Senate has only 49 days left on its legislative calendar for the year.

And the pro-amendment crowd is armed with powerful constitutional arguments. "Ever since the Boy Scouts first taught me how to care for our flag over 40 years ago, it has always held a special place in my heart," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said in a press release yesterday.

That's not to say the senators were feeling energetic as they took up the amendment. The day's session started at 2 p.m., but by 2:21, there was no senator on the floor to speak, and the chamber went into a quorum call -- its equivalent of a nap -- for the next hour.