The forgotten American victims of the Bush wars

And so they are starting to trickle home, these men and women, many of whom enlisted in the military after the 9/11 attacks with the purest of motives -- what they believed to be a fight to both avenge the attacks and to dismantle the groups that made such an attack possible. Those missing legs, arms, and eyes come home as soon as they are well enough to travel after injury. But sometimes there are invisible injuries that are just as serious, and they are coming home to a country whose government offers little to help them, and nothing to help the forgotten new victims of these wars -- the people who love them and now care for them, who, in this Ron Paul paradise in which our veterans live, they have to rely on private organizations (NYT link):

Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.

Even as they grieve over a family member’s injuries, they struggle to adjust to new routines and reconfigured relationships.

The new lives take a searing toll. Many of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain weight and experience health problems. On their now-frequent trips to the pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as well.

While taking comfort that their loved ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential strain of years, or even decades, of care.

“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”

Those attending to the most severely wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.

One of the most frustrating aspects of life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system, forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.

A variety of care services are offered to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or unavailable.

Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial ailment that may be stress related and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.

“I just saw all of my dreams kind of vanishing,” she said.

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to enact a law providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers of service members. In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September, the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and counseling.

“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,” said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”

Read the linked article, and then think about recent Republican rhetoric about lazy people who don't work, and about how we simply cannot ask the people whose interests these men and women went to protect, to pay even one thin dime more towards their care, and about how the needy should depend on charity instead of the government. What kind of a country are we that we would let these people get away with rhetoric like this, let alone seriously consider them as presidential timber? How can we be proud of a country that uses its young men and women like this and then brings them home and throws them on the trash heap of history while at the same time using the threat of terrorism to justify continued military spending on everything BUT the care of those who actually fight? Where is the yellow ribbon magnet crowd now? Why aren't they clamoring for better care for these people?

Mitch McConnell doesn't think you should be able to vote unless it's for people he likes

Why does Mitch McConnell hate America?

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it’s that we can’t leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

In other words, Mitch McConnell wants to overthrow the government and institute one in which he gets everything HE wants.

Again, I ask: Why does Mitch McConnell hate America?

(via)

And in case your brother-in-law who's been out of work for 2-1/2 years and can't wait to vote Repubicans back in, or your friend's mother who just can't trust a black man, or your co-worker who thinks Republicans will straighten everything out right quick want to know about the party they support, McConnell, who has already been on record as saying his only priority is to make Barack Obama a one-term president, reiterated his agenda today:

McConnell said that at this point the GOP had two choices: Either make a bad deal — from their perspective — with Obama or take the country into default, which, McConnell suggested would do even more damage to the party. He compared the situation to 1995, when the GOP forced a government shutdown.

“We know that’s going to happen. Just like we knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us,” he said. “It helped Bill Clinton get reelected. I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected.”

I wonder....

If Abbie Hoffman hadn't been such a clown, and if the Yippies had been into actually threatening the United States government instead of street theatre, would they have been more effective?

Probably not. The Yippie mistake was in choosing the symbols of the counterculture rather than appropriating those of patriotism in their flags and in their rhetoric of overthrowing the government. It's hard to have an effective revolution when you have a sense of humor and you're stoned much of the time.

No such mistakes for the Tea Partiers, however. They dress up in the costumes of the 1700s, and have as their spiritual leader not a clown like Abbie Hoffman, but a lunatic who's been associated with a secessionist party in her own state, and who at their weekend convention, called for "another revolution." Because after all, if you use the flag and you dress in tricorn hats, you can advocate implementing a police state that is at constant war with everyone else in the world, and the media will buy your bullshit that you are a patriot.

And has anything actually changed? CAN it even change? The netroots has had four conventions every summer, where OUR leaders have given speeches and appeared at breakout groups -- far more of them than appeared at this conference, and Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation has been treated in as some kind of little fringe meeting with almost no media coverage, not as a massive social movement the way the Teabaggers have, for all that only about 600 people appeared at their profit-making extravaganza. And while I understand that a two-foot snowfall is unusual for Washington DC (though apparently not as unusual as it used to be since they have had two of them this season), and I also realize that the only thing to do with this much snow is have fun in it, this kind of imagery -- a netroots snowball fight organized on Facebook -- just makes me feel even more hopeless. Because I'm sure this will get more media coverage than Netroots Nation ever will.

(UPDATE: Hortense over at Jezebel liveblogged the Moose Queen for the benefit of the weak of stomach.)