GOP To Vets: Drop Dead!
Edward Humes
November 07, 2006

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Over
Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream (Harcourt 2006).
He has contributed to Talk, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Los
Angeles magazine, and others. For more information, visit
www.edwardhumes.com

If you visited the official, taxpayer-financed website of the U.S. House
Veterans Affairs Committee recently, you would have found a remarkable
headline at the very top of the page: “Pelosi Majority would abandon
system that provided strong veterans budgets, premier health care and
effective oversight.”

A diatribe from committee chairman Steve Buyer, R-Ind., ensued,
predicting doom and despair for veterans should voters cast out a
supposedly vet-loving Republican majority come November 8 and install in
its place that alleged Democratic hater of troops, Nancy Pelosi, as
majority leader.

Within a day of my inquiring how the official, nonpartisan website for a
standing House committee could be used to present such a nakedly
partisan, political message, the item vanished from the committee’s
internet presence, and the associated article was scrubbed from view
(but not from “The Google,” or from the PDF file preserved on my own
hard drive).

Aside from the fact that using government resources for political
messages is illegal, and the notion that a Republican majority can be
counted on to provide more oversight of President Bush’s veterans policy
(or any other of his policies) is laughable on its face, there’s a
bigger problem with the fear-mongering headline that sat since October
20 atop the website of the House committee charged with protecting our
veterans:

It’s a lie.

The simple fact is that Pelosi’s legislative record on supporting
veterans’ health care, education and other benefits is among the best in
the House, while Buyer’s ranges from mediocre to atrocious, depending on
who’s doing the rating. This is not a subjective judgment, but is based
on two separate analyses of voting records by distinctly different
veterans organizations—the venerable Disabled Veterans of America, and
the upstart Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. (Check the ratings
yourself from VAWatchdog.org and IAVA.)

It’s the current Republican leadership in Congress and the White House
that own the worst record for supporting veterans legislation—a
surprising reality utterly at odds with their support-the-troops
rhetoric. Some of the loudest proponents of the war—embattled Sen. Mike
DeWine of Ohio comes to mind—have some of the poorest records for
supporting veterans (overall, Senate Republicans had a “D” average from
the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ group), while the most prominent war
critics and political liberals—Ted Kennedy, for one– have been the
strongest supporters of vets’ legislation (the Senate Democrats had a B+
average).

These votes touch almost every aspect of veterans’ lives: The will of
the majority has been to cut funds for brain injury research (more than
3,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered severe brain
trauma); to use phony prewar statistics to calculate an unrealistically
low but politically palatable cost estimate for veterans health care
(causing a $3 billion budget shortfall now coming due); and to rebuff
Democratic attempts to correct inequities in the G.I. Bill that cheat
National Guard and reserve troops (who have contributed half the
fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan) out of college aid.

Oddly, this substantive measure of support for the troops has gotten
almost no media play this election season—nothing compared to the absurd
brouhaha over John Kerry’s recently botched punch line about the poorly
educated being stranded in Iraq. (The context makes it clear Senator
Foot-in-Mouth intended a jab at our C-student president’s failed war,
not the troops bravely fighting it.) This curious inattention from major
news media persisted even when 400 wounded and disabled veterans came to
Congress and booed Buyer and other Republican committee members during
the hearings in which the deliberate $3-billion shortfall was
engineered. Buyer’s dismissive, insulting response: “Where the river is
the shallowest, it makes the most noise.” This was the chairman of the
House Veterans Affairs Committee speaking about the concerns and anger
of wounded combat veterans—as quoted in, of all places, Stars and
Stripes . Buyer followed up with a move to ban testimony of the service
organizations at future hearings.

This unapologetic, shoot-the-messenger behavior is in stark contrast to
the gold-standard for veterans legislation set in 1944 with the original
G.I. Bill of Rights, crafted in the midst of a cataclysmic war by
Franklin Roosevelt, a bipartisan Congress, and the American Legion—the
granddaddy of veterans service organizations, whose representatives not
only testified, but actually wrote the first draft of one of the
greatest legislative accomplishments in history. Consider these two
contrasting images to see how far we’ve sunk since then:

• After World War II, millions of veterans lined up for hours for a
remarkable purpose: To register for free college educations, to buy
homes with no money down and mortgages cheaper than rent, to sign up for
vocational training and job counseling, and to apply for business and
farm loans—all courtesy of Uncle Sam and the original G.I. Bill.

• In the wake of the Iraq war and occupation, a different sort of line
came be found at military bases nationwide: bread lines. Thousands of
military families have been left so impoverished they must queue up for
donations of surplus cheese, day-old bread and damaged boxes of frozen
food . This is especially true for bases in areas with high costs of
living, such as the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where
food lines have become a weekly fixture.

When our warriors come home from Iraq, all too many find empty bank
accounts, maxed-out credit cards and the realization that the college
benefits used to entice enlistees often don’t cover the costs of a
4-year degree, nor support their families while they’re in class. And
they actually have to have a payroll deduction in order to even qualify
for those benefits. Still others, wounded in a war costing the country
$10 million an hour, learn that their president and Congress have cut
programs to heal their injuries, post-combat stress, and economic
distress. Some vets wait six months for medical care. There are an
estimated 200,000 homeless veterans from all eras on the streets at the
moment; at least six hundred of them are known to have served in the
current war in Iraq.

This is the shameful record that the House Veterans Affairs committee
website warned must be preserved at all costs in the upcoming election.
Pelosi would not comment on the now-vanished jab at her on the Veterans
Committee website. However, she took her own shot at the “moral
priorities” of the “Republican Rubber Stamp Congress” she hopes to
unseat in the midterm elections: “On the battlefield, our troops pledge
to leave no soldier behind. Here at home, we must leave no veteran
behind.”

Unfortunately, this is not merely a story of shortchanged veterans and
hypocritical congressmen who support war but not warriors. That’s just
an awful symptom of a bigger problem: a wholesale failure to invest in
America’s future. Just imagine how a politician today would be mocked if
he proposed offering an entire generation free college (with stipends),
subsidized mortgages, job training and medical care. Yet today’s
unthinkable was yesterday’s matter of course. There was no hesitation,
no griping about government being the problem, not the solution. This
bit of modern conventional wisdom—the animating principal of the
government haters now in charge of our government—would have seemed like
crazy talk back then to most Americans. And when FDR signed the G.I.
Bill on behalf of 16 million veterans—1 out of 8 Americans at the
time—he ended up powering far more than a return to the status quo. The
G.I. Bill transformed the nation and the American Dream, opening up the
colleges (formerly elite bastions), raising suburbs out of bean fields
(a nation of renters became a nation of homeowners), growing the middle
class (from 1 in 10 before the war to 1 in 3 a decade after), and
providing the medical, engineering and scientific prowess to conquer
dread diseases, usher in the information age and win the Cold War. It
was what every social welfare program must aspire to be if it is to
succeed: a hand up, not a hand-out.

Such luminaries as Bob Dole, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Rehnquist,
Warren Christopher, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George McGovern,
among many others, got their starts through the G.I. Bill, as did 14
Nobel Prize winners, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers,
91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers and a million
assorted lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers and
pilots. This was a wise investment in every sense: A 1988 congressional
study found that every dollar spent on education under the bill returned
$7 through increased productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue.
Unlike the $505 billion and counting being flushed down the Iraq drain,
the G.I. Bill left us safer, stronger, more united and more prosperous.
That’s called investing in the future—not for the next quarter, but the
next quarter century.

We need that sort of an investment today, a new G.I. Bill for all
Americans—not only for those in the military, but those young men and
women who might choose other forms of service. Had FDR lived to serve
out a last term in peacetime, America would have had such a program of
national service. What heights could we have lifted our young people
with the half trillion dollars flushed so far down the Iraq drain—and
the even larger sum that staying the course will undoubtedly cost in the
future. Instead, the American Dream so generously nurtured through the
G.I. Bill after World War II is now under siege, from the cost of
college to the cost of homeownership to the shrinking middle class to
the declining numbers of advanced engineering and science degrees our
young people earn.

Now we have the unbearable sight of breadlines for the families of our
brave military men and women, inadequate budgets to care for wounded
veterans, G.I. Bill college benefits that disappear in a haze of
Pentagon fine print—and of congressmen and a president who point fingers
everywhere but the mirror.

--
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous,
with it man attains the realm beyond the material,
and the Peyote tells us,
where to find it."