Hired help

Another vitriolic anti-Christian, and especially anti-Catholic, rant from that "other woman who sprinkles her commentary with a vulgar term for female genitalia."

And that's only the beginning of the abject horror wounded veterans are facing during life as "outpatients" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, some of whom "have been stuck there for as long as two years." Black mold invades the walls. Veterans aren't given the most basic help they need, including assistance finding their rooms. People go missing and no one knows what happened to them. Forms are lost, and lost again, and again. "The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide. Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment." Veterans are required to prove who they are and that they fought in the war....

Why aren't we taking better care of these men and women?

Sorry, Shakes, I couldn't follow your point because I was distracted by all the vulgar references etc.  Plus all the anti-Catholic vitriol offended me.

Shakespeare's Sister's post went up on her page Sunday.  The George Will column I was quoting and mocking in my opening was published Sunday too, so Will could not have read Shakes' post before he wrote his column.

Hat tip, by the way, to The Vanity Press.

Of course I don't believe Will read a word Shakes has written on any subject before he wrote his column.  If anything he had some intern do a search of her page for examples of cussin' and otherwise just took the word of William Donohue that she's a foul-mouthed anti-Catholic bigot, just like Amanda Marcotte, whose blogging history I'm equally sure Will never bothered to dip into.

A lot is infuriating about the assaults on Shakes and Amanda that resulted in their resignations from the Edwards internet team, after a barrage of threatening email and vitriolic comments made them rightfully concerned for their personal safety---if Will wanted to read some real hate-filled, vulgar stuff he should have checked out the comments of the Right Wing Catholics and Christians who came to the defense of their religion of love and peace by wishing all kinds of actual bodily harm upon Shakes and even offering to inflict it themselves.

And one of the infuriating things is the way that in the media coverage of the story Shakes and Amanda have been lumped together, written about as a kind of feminist pushmi-pullyu, one animal with two heads with just one thing on both minds and two mouths both saying the same things in the same ways. 

Both women have been written about and talked about as if their blogs were about nothing else other than ranting against the Church.

Of course the Right Wing types want to portray them both as caricatures of shrieking feminist harpies.  That's how they try to portray all Liberals.

And it's not surprising that the stenographers in the supposed Liberal media buy this.  How many of the journalists "reporting" the story do you think bothered to read either Pandagon or Shakespeare's Sister.  None of them that I've seen seems to have noticed that both are group blogs.

But it's dismaying that even some of their defenders have treated the two as one, and that one as nothing other than an obsessed feminist critic of mainstream religion.  Salon's Joan Walsh not only seems to accept the caricature, although she rephrases it to sound almost positive, she seems to approve of Shakes and Amanda because of it.

At any rate, what's lost in all this, along with any sense that there are two distinct talents and voices at work on the left side of the bandwidth, is all the good writing and reporting Shakes has done on a wide-range of issues, not only at Shakespeare's Sister, but also at Raw Story and Alternet and in her "Comment is Free" posts for the Guardian.  You wouldn't know from following the story outside the blog world that Shakes' impassioned post about the horrible mistreatment of our wounded soldiers and Marines is far more typical of her work than anything she's written critical of the Christian Right, which, as if you need the reminding, is a political movement not a religious one.  America's history is punctuated with periods of religious revival, but in the past those revivals were missionary in nature.  The idea was to preach and persuade and to ultimately convert by example.  These days the idea is to force a set of political beliefs down the throats of all Americans by taking over the government in the name of God.  Of course that form of "religion" is going to get some critical attention from those of us who don't want to buy its snake oil.

The good news is that the controversy has sent a lot of new readers Shakes' way, readers who are going to be greeted with posts like the one on the veterans.

Honestly, this should rightly be regarded as yet another planning failure. The architects of this war thought it was going to be a cakewalk; they didn't in their wildest dreams consider the war would last this long, and thusly failed utterly to prepare contingency plans, as has been acknowledged even by the administration. The military healthcare system isn't designed to manage a constant influx of wounded soldiers, and I would bet that not a modicum of thought was given to readying it for that possibility. The war was going to last six weeks, remember? But instead, the war became "a long hard slog," as Donald Rumsfeld described it in November 2003, and now "Three times a week, school buses painted white and fitted with stretchers and blackened windows stream down Georgia Avenue. Sirens blaring, they deliver soldiers groggy from a pain-relief cocktail at the end of their long trip from Iraq via Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Andrews Air Force Base." The Pentagon numbers the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan at 23,000, as of January.

Our wounded veterans, 96% of whom received their injuries after "Mission Accomplished," were first casualties of the utter lack of competent post-war planning for the war theater, and are now casualties of the utter lack of competent post-war planning at home. They're pratically stacked on top of each other in a rotting building, all but abandoned to circumstances unfit for a dog, no less a veteran.

Think George Will is going to come back to read that one?

Wouldn't matter if he did.  It would just be gibberish to the likes of him.  Will's on the side of the aristocrats, and this is an aristocrats' war---remind me to post about how the "Conservative" movement has been all about creating an American aristocracy and they're beginning the way all aristocrats began throughout history, as thugs and thieves.  Remember, Queen Elizabeth owes her throne to one of the most egregious acts of property theft in history.  The Huns didn't steal with as much abandon and murderous glee as William the Conqueror and his band of pirates did.---and to aristocrats soldiers, all soldiers, including the generals, have always been the hired help.

Of course, from their point of view, all of us who aren't in the club are the help.

We should all just be grateful that they allow us to live.  Decent wages?  Good and affordable health care?  Comfortable and secure retirements?  Good schools for our kids?  It is to laugh.  All that is the privilege of the aristos.  We need to all learn our place.

If a soldier didn't want to lose an arm or leg being a soldier, then he should have had the good sense to have been born to the right sort of family so he wouldn't have had to be a soldier in the first place, donchewknow?

More on the awfulness of it, and the War Hawks' contempt for the troops they want us all to support by allowing them to send more of them to their needless deaths, from Taylor Marsh.

Comments

[grasshopper]

Does anyone know how to fight back? Maybe that makes no sense, fighting fire with fire. Even a successful revolution achieves a little change that only lasts a little while. And then before you blink and sigh, the wrong people are once again literally calling the shots.
Your post says it well and perhaps taking a long--very long--view, writing about as many travesties as possible just might show people how to recognize the real from the fake.

[Amanda Marcotte]

Hell, one reporter I talked to seemed to think that I wrote the Plan B joke on the Edwards blog.

[nola]

George Will won't bother with their blogs for the same reason Edwards fired them - - vulgarity still turns some people off. I know the hipsters of the left find that incredible but I'm afraid it is true. And if Will was not sufficiently put off by the language in a blog like Pandagon, maybe he read one of her Duke lacrosse posts and decided she was an idiot. He wasn't the only one. As for the brilliance of McEwan, all she did was piggback on another article. Nobody who read the actual report would have gained much from her overheated commentary.

The bit about the aristocracy was amusing, though. I'll be sure to pass this on to my blue collar Catholic friends in Queens and my military friends in the South. They had no idea that they were aristorcrats - - what a pleasant surprise.

[JD]

"Think George Will is going to come back to read that one?"

No. I doubt George read any of the stuff in the first place. I surmise that he has staff for that; they research and tell him what he thinks.

[JD]

Duh...sorry Lance, can we remove the above? I must have agreed with you so much I decided to repeat what you said. (burning blush issues from flyover country)

[CJColucci]

Nola: Just because the butler and the scullery maid approve of aristocrats -- as they are unduly wont to --doesn't mean that the aristocrats aren't aristocrats, and that the butler and the scullery maid aren't "the hired help."

[nola]

Your argument would have more merit if there were fewer butlers and maids and more aristocrats. And the same claim can be made about the Democratic Party. Not that I subscribe to it - - insulting the intelligence of voters is something I would rather leave to the Left.