It’s that time of year again. Memorial Day weekend. When politicians of all parties love to pretend they care about the men and women they send away to fight and die for wars of political expediency, only to pretty much completely ignore them for the rest of their lives once they come back home.
The latest “outrage” about the various failings of the Veterans Administration is just more evidence of that. The Obama administration has known about many of the problems for years, but hasn’t done nearly enough to fix them. Now that the issues have found their way into the media again, the Republicans, who’ve spent years denying veterans benefits and refusing to fund the VA at levels adequate to support their much-beloved wars-without-end, are pretending to be upset about it all — now that they believe they can use it to hurt their real enemy, this particular President of the United States.
And that’s where The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart jumped back in to the matter last week, pointing out that the latest hypocrisy is, in fact, not particularly new for the U.S., not by a long shot.
Our friend Tom Courbat of Riverside, CA (decidedly not to be confused with Pennsylvania’s democracy and freedom hating Gov. Tom Corbett) — a Vietnam-era Agent Orange and Multiple Myeloma Surviving veteran, as well as great homefront hero of Democracy for many, many years — requested we post Stewart’s latest take over this Memorial Day weekend. We are all too happy to do so. It is, quite literally, the very least we can do to say thanks to Tom and all the others vets who have given far more for their country than it will ever be able to return in kind.
As Courbat writes us about Stewart’s take (posted below): “Nothing, nothing I have EVER seen summarized as well how our country has managed to screw over our vets, going all the way back to our war for independence from England! You will be blown away by what you learn — and this MUST be shown for the Memorial Day.”
And so it shall be. Both parts of Stewart’s epic takedown from Thursday night’s show follow below. If you only have time for one of the two parts, let it be PART 2…
PART 2:
What an appalling record.
Jon Stewart is, as ever, brilliant.
Brad, thank you so much for posting the portion of last Thursday’s comedy central the daily show with Jon Stewart’s episode about screwing our veterans. He totally hit the nail on the head at the end of part two when he concluded
“So let’s pretend that this VA crisis Is an anomaly created by one unusually callous and ineffective president. But that would be just pretend. Or, on this Memorial Day weekend eve, we can finally admit that America has had for over 200 years, a great bipartisan tradition of honoring those who have fought for our freedom by fu*¥ing them over once they give their guns back.”
John makes a brief but oh so important reference to our government’s use of agent orange-the most deadly combination of toxins known – ultimately causing hundreds of thousands of cancer cases and deaths our own soldiers not to mention millions of cases involving those who call the countries of Southeast Asia home.
And finally a big shout out to Monsanto and Dow Chemical for producing Agent Orange! Thaks so much for allowing some of us to experience it firsthand 45 years before it became part of the new great American GMO tradition!! :(!
This “VA Thing” is, of course, a manufactured event, dont cha think? Well, I need to investigate the whistleblower in this case — was on CNN but I did not see the entire interview.
People knew about poor VA help for years, sporatic reporting it may have been…
Expect much more similar “events” until 2016!
Nice!