reality-based educator

Here's a heartbreaking story from Bradblog.com (Via Atrios):

U.S. Army Specialist Tomas Young has some questions for George W. Bush. He's never met with the Commander-in-Chief who sent him into Sadr City, Iraq in a canvass covered truck during a massive uprising in that city on April 4, 2004. The same city on the same day that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey was killed.

Tomas was lucky. He was only paralyzed from the chest down. Amongst other things he'd like to ask of Bush, is why he won't allow funding for stem cell research which might eventually restore the spine that he lost in Bush's War. A spine, as Tomas explained to us yesterday on The BRAD SHOW, which apparently Bush has never had.

Tomas and his new wife Bree (also pictured), came to Crawford from Kansas City on their honeymoon to "stand" in support of Cindy Sheehan.

Now here's a picture of Preznit Bush's twin daughters doing what they do best - falling down drunk:





Why aren't the Bush twins fighting this war? Why aren't Cheney's daughters enlisting? Why aren't the children of other pro-war politicans taking the fight to the terrorists in Iraq? Editor & Publisher reports that many pro-war politicians are starting to be asked that very question:

Press Wants to Know if Pro-War Officials Will Send Their Own Kids to War

By E&P Staff

Published: August 27, 2005 7:45 PM ET

NEW YORK It's a question from the press sure to be posed more and more as the months go on, directed at public officials who continue to support the Iraq war: If you believe in the cause so deeply, why aren't your own kids signing up? Most prominently, President Bush (through his press spokesmen) is now hearing it, but it's now trickling down to the congressional and state level.

Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a strong backer of Bush policy in Iraq -- who has two sons age 24 to 35 -- heard the query yesterday, from a Boston Herald reporter. Romney, who has promoted National Guard recruitment, replied, a bit angrily, that he has not urged his own sons to enlist -- and isn't sure whether they would.

The Herald tossed the question as Romney as he was honored by the Massachusetts National Guard. "No, I have not urged my own children to enlist. I don't know the status of my childrens' potentially enlisting in the Guard and Reserve," Romney said, his voice tinged with anger, the Herald reported.

Neither the Romney children nor the governor have served in the military, a Romney spokeswoman said.

More than 1,100 guardsmen and women from Massachusetts are currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 28 Massachusetts soldiers killed so far.

"I don't think you should be so 'rah-rah' for a war that you aren't willing to send your own family members to," Rose Gonzalez of Somerville, whose mother, a state employee, was deployed to Iraq in January, told the Herald. "If he thinks the war is so just and so important and we shouldn't pull out, then he should encourage his own sons to go."

Nancy Lessin, a spokeswoman for Military Families Speak Out, said, "This is just one more politician who is willing to risk the lives of our loved ones and celebrate sending them off into a war that we never should have [been] in."

It's easy to support a war when you never have to place yourself or your own flesh and blood in danger. All pro-war supporters, whether they are politicians or not, should be asked how they can support a war they are not willing to fight (or send their own kids to fight). Perhaps Americans would have been less eager to invade Iraq and more questioning of the administration's various rationales for the war, if more than just military families had been asked to sacrifice.

Two final notes: Mitt Romney will make the perfect Republican presidential candidate in 2008 - he's a chickenhawk war supporter who's happy to keep his own kids safe here on the homefront while sending other people's kids to die.

I also bet Romney will be happy to "Swift Boat" his fellow Republican presidential candidate and twice-wounded Vietnam war veteran Chuck Hagel (R-NE) as being an Iraq war "defeatist" who supported "a cut-and-run" strategy. Hagel has been highly critical of the Bush administration's war policy from the beginning and has stated more than once he believes the United States is losing the war. While you would think Hagel's veteran status and actual combat experience would innoculate him from charges that he's a "defeatist," we saw during last year's presidential election that chickenhawks like George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Mitt Romney have no problem impugning the record of a war veteran.