Even more interesting, the Veteran's organizations lashed back: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/us/veterans-groups-lash-out-at-republican-senator.html?hp&_r=0
Back in February, Senator Burr joined 40 other Republican senators in killing Senator Sanders' bill to fund more support for veterans. This video clip has an extract from Burr's speech on the floor: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/05/25/the-one-video-everyone-needs-to-remember-on-memorial-day-video/
The Republican "concern" over deficits is hogwash. They cared nothing for deficits when they sent the troops to war while cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Remember Dick Cheney gloating the Reagan proved that "deficits don't matter?"
And they have consistently refused to appropriate the funds requested by the VA even as the burden of wounded veterans on the system has drastically increased.
The real Republican agenda seems to be to privatize the VA. Send our veterans off to private health care facilities. Senator Sanders got it about right:
| "The real issue here, if you look at the Koch Brothers' agenda, is: look at what many of the extreme right-wing people believe. Obamacare is just the tip of the iceberg. These people want to abolish the concept of the minimum wage, they want to privatize the Veteran's Administration, they want to privatize Social Security, end Medicare as we know it, massive cuts in Medicaid, wipe out the EPA, you don't have an Environmental Protection Agency anymore, Department of Energy gone, Department of Education gone. That is the agenda. And many people don't understand that the Koch Brothers have poured hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the Tea Party and two other kinds of ancillary organizations to push this agenda." | ||
—Senator Bernie Sanders, MSNBC News (October 7, 2013) (regarding the US government shutdown of 2013).
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