The Community Organizer Commander

Soldiers and veterans interest me because I’ve never been one, and because many are regular readers of this column. When they allow it, I like to pick their brains. They’ve had experiences I’ve never had and never will have. I almost joined up after high school, but didn’t, and I’ve often regretted that. Even if they haven’t been in combat, soldiers have worked and lived closely with others who have, and it changed them in some fundamental way. My sense is that for most the change has been a net positive —especially for Marines and soldiers with elite training such as Special Forces and Seals. I’m curious how they feel about changes taking place in the government of the country they’ve offered their lives to defend. They are, or have been, instruments of that government, yet many I’ve talked to lately express profound dissatisfaction with it even before the VA scandal broke.

Washington has deep misgivings about veterans too. In 2012 the Department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano profiled what sort of people are potential terrorists and the list included Iraq veterans. Also mentioned were “extreme right-wing” organizations, people who “believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack,” or people who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty.” People of Janet Napolitano’s ilk consider the Tea Party an “extreme right-wing organization,” consequently this writer and many readers fit the profile. So do virtually all conservative Republicans and Libertarians. 

Surviving veterans, many of whom offered their lives in service to these individual liberties, are indeed suspicious of an increasingly centralized federal authority so disdainful of them as to consider them potential terrorists. The irony here is that 95% of terrorists worldwide are Muslims, and over the last thirteen years thousands of American soldiers have died and more than a hundred thousand others have been wounded while fighting them. Yet, while the Obama Administration forbids profiling Muslim terrorists as terrorists, it has no problem profiling American veterans of the Iraq War as potential terrorists.

Now consider that the VA gives “top notch medical treatment” to Muslim terrorists imprisoned at Gitmo — far better than it provides to our veterans. According to information a Pentagon insider provided to Judicial Watch:

There are approximately 150 terrorists at Gitmo yet the VA has 100 doctors, nurses and healthcare personnel assigned to them, [retired Navy Commander J. D.] Gordon says. ‘Doctors and medical personnel are at their beck and call,’ he confirms, adding that they are readily available for things as minor as a cold, fever, toothache or chest and back pain. The jihadists who murdered thousands of Americans never have to wait, Gordon says, because the Gitmo patient to healthcare provider ratio is 1.5 to 1. ‘No problem, come right on in,’ Gordon writes in his piece. If you risked your life serving your country, however, the ratio is 35 to 1.

As Michelle Malkin points out that America’s illegal aliens get much better health care than our veterans too:

In New York, doctors report that nearly 40 percent of their patients receiving kidney dialysis are illegal aliens. A survey of nephrologists in 44 states revealed that 65 percent of them treat illegal aliens with kidney disease. In Memphis, a VA whistle-blower reported that his hospital was using contaminated kidney-dialysis machines to treat America’s warriors. The same hospital previously had been investigated for chronic overcrowding at its emergency room, leading to six-hour waits or longer… In Arizona, illegal aliens incurred health-care costs totaling an estimated $700 million in 2009. [Meanwhile’] in Phoenix, at least 40 veterans died waiting for VA hospitals and clinics to treat them, while government officials created secret waiting lists to cook the books and deceive the public about deadly treatment delays.

We’re hearing lots of excuses from Washington about the VA scandal. In spite of the fact that Obama made at least seven speeches in the last seven years promising he would not rest until he had fixed the waiting times at VA, and emphasizing how absolutely outraged he was about it, White House advisor Dan Ffeiffer had the gall to say last week that the president only recently heard about the problem on the news.

This is our commander-in-chief, the man in whom our soldiers must have confidence when he sends them into battle. As the House Select Committee on Benghazi unravels what really happened on September 11, 2012, Americans will learn what President Obama was doing as his aids watched Muslim terrorists attack the compound there. What exactly was the commander-in-chief's response when brave American soldiers, vastly outnumbered and outgunned, fought desperately for so many hours and ultimately died as they awaited reinforcements that never came?