This is a statement released today by Benjamin Lodmell, candidate for the First District Congressional seat in Alabama. Reprinted here with Lodmell’s permission. Please support his candidacy with contributions to his Act Blue account.
Alabama can be in play, but only if we assume that it is doable.
THEY’RE STILL IN ‘HARM’S WAY’ WHEN TROOPS COME HOME
I wonder if Bush’s man in Mobile, Republican Congressman Jo Bonner, missed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on the soldier who suffered a nervous breakdown after collecting body parts during two tours of bloody carnage in Iraq? I wonder if Jo knows the Army discharged that soldier, claiming he had a “personality disorder” that pre-dated his military service and not post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wonder if Bonner knows the Army denied that soldier his full veteran’s benefits – or that the Army demanded the return of $14,597.72 from the soldier’s re-enlistment bonus? Or that more than 22,000 service personnel have been discharged similarly since 2001?
I wonder if the Republican congressman from the first district knows that the U.S. military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back some of their re-enlistment bonuses because they can no longer serve, having lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing – and, in some cases, all of the above? Or that 20,000 troops returned home with brain injuries that were not even classified as wounds received in combat?
I wonder if Bonner knows that? Or that as 60,000 veterans have been waiting six months or more for an appointment at a VA hospital? Or that the VA has a backlog of over 600,000 disability claims? Or that it takes an average of 177 days to have those claims adjudicated?
Surely he must know about the scandalous living conditions and care being provided wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And if that’s not close enough to home for Jo Bonner, all he has to do is talk with Alabama’s Department of Health, which recently threatened to crackdown on a Baldwin County veterans’ nursing home following the death of two patients and allegations of improper medical care.
Of course Jo Bonner knows. The question is what did he do about it and when? And more importantly why did he and his White House boss so eagerly send hundreds of thousands of America’s God-blessed men and women into an infernal combat quagmire only to have many thousands of them return bloodied and dismembered but proud and unbowed to a bureaucratic nightmare and an ungrateful Administration that failed to properly care for them?
What took you so long to vote for the funding, Jo, when just about everybody in America knew the enormity of your failure? It wasn’t the money, Jo, was it? It was politics, plain and simple. And that kind of partisan politics stinks to high heaven.
Ben Lodmell
Candidate for Congress
Alabama’s First District