Dereliction And Dishonor

It looks like a lot of congressmen - both Republican and Democrat - knew things were bad at Walter Reed for a long time, and didn't go public about it. All are saying they did all the could, that they didn't want to "give the Army a black eye" and so kept things at a "personal level", that it's the Pentagon's fault.

Bullshit.

Go read about the death of Staff Sergeant William Latham, please. Then come back.

And note that Rep Bill Young, who chaired the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee under the Republican majority, condemned with his own words the feeble excuses he and others have profferred.

So our role here, my role as a member of this Congress and this committee, our role is to fix what needs to be fixed, to guarantee that our soldiers, our heroes, our people who are doing what they've been sent to do on the battlefield, that they are getting the type of care that they deserve, and they deserve the best medical care that we have available.

And as I've said, if we don't identify the problem we don't fix it.

The notion that any of these congressmen thought, for a second, that the cases of neglect and malfeasance they were seeing were isolated incidents is ludicrous. None of them compared notes even in idle conversation? None wondered if the people they were seeing were the only ones? It's plain self-serving butt guarding.

They knew. They should have had sufficient honor to get up and make a massive public stink until all the problems were known and fixed. They should have chosen the troops. Instead they chose loyalty to the party, or to the military they were once a part of.

Remember how disgusted we all were when party bigwigs ducked behind every available scrap of cover to explain why they didn't act on Mark Foley far earlier?

How much worse is this?