The Grave Robbers In Washington---HOW DARE THEY - By Charles P. Pierce

[kpete]

The Grave Robbers In Washington
By Charles P. Pierce at 12:20pm


My father died in 1989, a victim of Alzheimer's Disease. In his younger days, he was a combat Naval veteran of World War II. Because of that, he was able to take advantage of a big-government program called the GI Bill of Rights. Because of that, he was eligible for a comfortable big-government pension when he retired from his career in a big-government program called the public schools. His politics were very conservative, almost radically so. (It was he who suggested I spend a rainy weekend reading None Dare Call It Treason, a sort of ur-text for Birchite winguttia.) He is not here to speak for himself, so I will do so. It is not merely unseemly, but positively obscene for people like Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, and the unspeakable Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods to use surviving World War II veterans to advance a political agenda that would make the lives of those veterans immeasurably worse. It is obscene for them to use old, brave men as camouflage for bigotry and nonsense. It is obscene for them to borrow courage that never would find in themselves and to gussy it up in Confederate flags and trot it out as an an audience for crackpots like Larry Klayman. It is obscene for them to claim for themselves the dead of Normandy, and the Bulge, and Okinawa, and Saipan. It is obscene for them to try to purify their own vandalism in worthier blood than flows in their veins.

How dare these idiots? Tailgunner Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, the constitooshunal skolar from Utah, and Ms. Palin. How dare they traffick in this manner of grave-robbing? They would all throw these veterans off Medicare, close the VA hospitals, bury the brave old men and women in substandard nursing homes rather than give an inch away of their indomitable ideology of entitled selfishness. Ted Cruz doesn't think the government has a role in making the lives of these veterans easier. Mike Lee thinks the Founders wanted vets to starve. Sarah Palin doesn't think, period, and is proud of it.

The American Right has never looked as fundamentally reckless and inhumane as it did when it attempted to burglarize heroism over the weekend. All the chickenhawks came home to roost, for sure. To see Princess Dumbass there, one hand on her heart while the other one very likely was picking pockets, attempting to wrap herself in the sacrifice of so many people, living and dead, when the hardest thing she's ever done in her life is quit her job halfway through doing it, is to see a kind of ghastly kind of historical vampirism. It takes a special lack of conscience to grift the graves of the honored dead. It's enough to make you root very hard for the Curse Of The Pharaohs. My father doesn't need the intercession of these delusional creatures. On his behalf, I say, in god's name, walk away from decent people in shame.


Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/republicans-using-wwii-vets-for-political-agenda-101413

[Fla Dem]

1. Charlie tells it like it is in his own distinct style. Thanks. nt

[Hekate]

2. "On his behalf, I say, in god's name, walk away from decent people in shame."

KnR

[BrotherIvan]

3. At long last, have you left, no sense of decency?

Scathing & brilliant. I often wonder how we will make the nutters finally see, at long last, that the Grand Old Party has been using them and intends to in fact destroy the country they hold so dear? But then, I realize, they may never see and that we have used too much energy to try to make them see. We must in fact trod over them in order to create the nation they give lip service to and then dig up the foundations at night like prisoners gone mad. They are malignant to the welfare of the people. Let them go to their corners and consume themselves with hatred. No more.

[brer cat]

4. Huge K and R!!!

[Scuba]

5. Pierce is my new favorite opinionator, now that the Duchess St. Rollins is on hiatus.

[hatrack]

6. Righteous!

Thank you, Mr. Pierce - a perfect distillation of the ghoulish Clownfuck that passes for "conservatism" in Ameria.