Some stories that I come across cause my hair to burst into flames and my eyeballs to explode. This is one of them.
It’s about priorities. Our congress critters are appropriating another $400 billion to cover the military’s 2007 budget, which does not even include the cost of Bush’s war in Iraq, now running at $8 billion per month. It’s a grotesquely-bloated budget.
Enjoying Hightower's work? Join us over at our new home on Substack:
However, that’s an old story. Here’s the incendiary part. Backed by the White House, congress has singled out one of the Pentagon’s programs to cut in half. You might hope that it’s one of the massively-expensive, fraud-ridden, wasteful weapons programs run by such giants as Lockheed… but, no. Instead, congress is going after a little, $14 million dollar program that does research and provides treatment for – get ready for your hair to catch fire – brain injuries that our soldiers suffer as a result of bomb blasts.
Hello. Bomb-inflicted brain injuries are the signature wound of the Iraq war! Yet, in the midst of that very war, with our soldiers continuing to sustain these horrible injuries, bozos in congress are slashing funding for the one program that helps these victims. How’s that for boosting the morale of the troops?
Why cut this one program? Here’s what a spokeswoman for Senate Republicans said: “Honestly, [the senators] would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities. They didn’t have any flexibility in such a tight fiscal year.”
Sheesh, these same senators constantly shout “support the troops,” yet they can’t muster the fiscal “flexibility” to allocate a mere 0.00002 percent of the Pentagon budget to troops coming home with brain trauma. What frauds!
This is Jim Hightower saying… Every lawmaker supporting this unpardonable cut should immediately be deployed for a six-month, frontline tour of duty in Baghdad… without a helmet.
Sources:
“Center for war-related brain injuries faces budget cut,” USA Today, August 8, 2006.
Special rate for original Lowdown readers